What happens to hopelessly lost luggage?

It's extremely rare that I devote a post to someone else's material. After all, one of the big reasons I devote much of my time to writing Keyboard & Rudder is to bring you my own personal, peculiar take on learning to fly in a fun, offbeat way. Instead of simply rehashing the same old, dry, academic topics in the same old, dry, academic ways you can find a hundred places elsewhere, I try to cover either something you won't find anywhere else (like extraterrestrial airports) or to cover a topic in a way no one else does (like actually admitting when I make a mistake so we can learn from it).

Dan Lewis has had an outstanding newsletter called Now I Know for quite some time. (In fact, I linked to one of his stories in #10 of my post "Ten for 110: Ten things you might not know about the Wright Brothers".) Although it's not an aviation newsletter, he covers an offbeat range of things in an engaging way. Occasionally, the odd and the overhead line up, as in "Where the Bags Go," an extremely interesting post on what happens to luggage that gets hopelessly lost.

While you're there reading that, you can sign up for his free newsletter to get more like that in your inbox. (You'll probably want to!) In fact, his newsletter is so good that he's turned it into a book, which is where the article originally comes from:

 

(If you use that link to buy it, you help support this site with a small commission at no cost to you, you help support his newsletter with a sale, and you get a fascinating book... everybody wins!)