I recently took a short trip to the US, and as I was walking away from my parked car, I started randomly wondering about what would be done with it in the event my flight met with catastrophe.
Presumably the vehicle is claimable by my family. How does that work? If the airport knows the identities of the people on the plane, is there any reason to make an effort to find their cars before someone comes forward? In a modern airport, vehicles are commonly photographed by security cameras and license plates logged; it would seem to be a relatively simple if modestly time consuming effort to look up plate numbers to identify the vehicles belonging to the known victims. If my family has more important things on their mind than “oh yeah, and we also want his car back,” would the authorities know, and inform them, that the car is on the premises?
Or if there’s no such effort, and they just wait for family members to ask after the car, how long would the car sit there, absent such a claim, before the garage managers notice, and do some investigation, and realize the car belongs to someone who died some time earlier? Or would they do no investigation, and simply report the car for towing after three months (or whatever), and then it’s up to the towing company to discover the owner’s fate when they try to make a financial claim for vehicle recovery?
One news story about 9-11 mentioned the sad fact that some vicitms were determined when their cars parked in assorted lots (like in Hoboken, for the trip across the river to Manhattan) started accumulating a significant amount of dust, indicating they hadn’t moved in a while.
When I traveled for work (2-5 flights a week typically), when I got to the airport, I’d text my wife the location of my car (level, section, row). I told her it was so I could look at my texts and easily find where I parked when I returned, but it was also so she could find the car if the plane went down in flames.
Doesn’t really answer the OP but I used to think about this question a lot too when I traveled, and didn’t want my wife to have to deal with a missing car on top of everything else.
The way we treat air travelers, I would expect the airport to sue the family of any who died in a disaster for the expense of towing and impounding the cars. With extra fines for each day it prevented somebody else from paying for a parking space.
I’ve known a few people who died in general aviation accidents, which is not the same situation logistically. In one of those cases I remember a friend suddenly realizing that the victim had pets at home and someone had better go look after them. That turned out to be a good call.
I’ve seen articles about airports auctioning off cars that have been abandoned for years in their parking lots. And of course the obvious question people ask in the comments is “Why would someone just leave their car in an airport parking lot?” And the answer, in at least some of the cases, is likely because they died while they were on their trip, and no one knew that’s where their car was.
My Daddy’s car was at a dealership service shop for something minor when he died suddenly.
We realized it the next day.
They held on to it til we got the death certificate and took it over, within a month.
They kindly reported the usually add a surcharge for cars left too long but they would subtract it from the bill. But, please pay the bill.
I pretty sure we weren’t responsible, and the dealership should bill his estate.
We paid, and my brother got in it and drove it home.
O flew from the Mpls-St Paul airport in like 1972. As I walked through the garage to the terminal I spotted a Mid-60’s Jaguar XKE (my favorite car at the time). It had 3 of it’s tires completely flat and a coat of dust on it’s top surfaces a quarter-inch thick. I assumed somebody flew out of that airport and died while away.
Typically, cars left in a parking lot will be towed and then be subject to a lien sale to recover any fees. The lien sale is typically through the DMV. They’ll attempt to contact the lien owner to first recover the fees. If the current lien holder doesn’t pay the fees, then the lien is put up for sale. I’m not sure if there’s a special process when there’s an air disaster. I suppose they could go through the plane’s manifest to find out the origin airports of the passengers and then see if any of those passengers have cars in the lot. However, I would think they’d only try to cross reference if the lot automatically recorded license plates. If the lot doesn’t automatically record the plate, I’d doubt they’d have anyone walk through the lot looking for the car. But even if the lot records the plates, I’d be surprised if they tried to identify the cars. I’d guess they’d just let the normal lien sale process happen and the family would be able to recover the car that way.
Dubai has thousands of luxury cars abandoned in airport parking lots:
These are cars from expats who have fallen on hard times and can no longer make the payments. There are stiff penalties in Dubai for not paying off your debt, so rather than end up in prison, these people leave their cars at the airport and fly back home.
After the Irish economy tanked in 2008, the roads leading to the airports were lined with hundreds of cars abandoned by Eastern European workers returning home. I assume the finance companies eventually sent fleets of tow trucks to repo them.
I was told a similar story by a cabbie going to Edmonton Airport - the oil workers from elsewhere would just abandon their leased pickups on the way home, which he pointed out as we got close.
There is an implicit assumption in that statement that everyone on the plane parked their car at the airport the plane took off from.
Particularly for a hub airport, about 70% of the people on any departing plane flew in from somewhere else to change planes at that hub and fly out again. Only 30% are starting their day’s journey here.
And of that 30%, half are people leaving their home to fly to [wherever] and half are leaving their personal [wherever] which is [here] to fly home. That latter group doesn’t leave a car in an airport parking lot.
Finally, of the ~15 percent who did leave their homes in this metro area today to arrive at the airport to then fly out, unfortunately then to crash, only some will have self-driven and parked. Others will have been dropped off by friends, family, cow-orkers, UberLyft, or ridden whatever flavors of public transit to get there. So however many people are on the plane, there’s probably only ~10% that many cars in that airport’s lot. At least for a hub.
The airline of course has the complete itinerary of everybody on the crashed jet. And could of course notify the airport parking management of each traveler’s origin city.
Separate matter …
In most major US airports there are not only the airport lots owned and operated by the airport itself, but a dizzying array of commercial lots, nearby hotels willing to store cars, warehouses, etc. Airport parking is a large and complicated industry. It is not nearly as simple as “the government agency owning and managing the airport owns and manages all the nearby parking too”. Even if an airline knew that Joe Blow boarded in Des Moines but died enroute between Chicago and [someplace], who in Des Moines would they notify? And why?
Yes, this thread has been quite useful in poking holes and pointing out the unexamined elements of my question. In my personal experience, I almost always either take transit or drive to my home airport; then I park on site and fly. But there are many other possible use cases, as it were.
So my takeaway here is that while it may be theoretically possible for vehicle ownership records to be matched against lists of victims based on airport-facility parking logs, in practice there is no effort to do so, for many reasons:
The effort would be out of scale with the likelihood of success, because you’d need to collect the vehicle logs from many, many parking facilities, not just the airport’s own garage but the various private options in the vicinity.
For any given victim of a specific crash, you’d need to know if he or she was flying directly out of the airport of that flight’s origin, or had transferred from an incoming flight and had therefore parked in a different city entirely, which means multiplying the complexity of the first bullet by many additional possible cities.
Many parking facilities do not, apparently, keep close tabs on the vehicles in their garages and lots, and don’t notice when a vehicle hasn’t moved in several weeks or longer. Indeed, lengthy stays may be in their financial interest, so they have a counter-incentive against the disposition of those cars.
Consequently, I conclude that the answer to my original question is basically that, outside of rare and specific exceptions, nothing happens to a car in this situation unless and until someone with a personal interest makes an effort to go looking for it.
Which means there’s a pretty good chance that at least a small number of these orphaned vehicles are scattered around airport garages right now, sitting and waiting for a driver who will never return. If the driver had no close family members who would want to retrieve the car (or if the driver used some obscure alternative parking option and the family has no idea where to look), and if the garage or lot is one of the (apparently) many that takes no notice of an essentially abandoned vehicle, then that car will sit there effectively forever.
A scenario where I would expect them to try to find the car of a passenger is when the passenger commits a terrorist act. The authorities would likely comb through whatever databases and recordings were necessary to identify how the person got to the airport. If they left their car in an airport lot, I’m certain the authorities would identify it as soon as possible. Whatever work it takes to do that would be pretty much the same if someone died in an air disaster.
Yeah, I’m sure there are some cars just sitting in lots. But ownership of cars is public record, as are deaths. So if the family or heir or lienholder of the car goes looking for it, I’m also sure they can recover it. And my guess is that’s what happens most of the time.