Lost bass is located at Manchester airport

Katherine Browning’s lost bass clarinet has been found at Manchester Airport, thanks to exceptional efforts made by a Slipped Disc reader, David Caris. We’re delighted all has turned out well. Here’s what Katherine tells us.

As you may have seen by the comments from the original post, the bass clarinet was located by staff member Mr David Caris at lost property (Terminal 1) at Manchester; he says that it must have been classed as ‘unattended’ and logged by security and screened. It was then “taken (by security) to be screened for IED / dangerous items etc and at the end of the day yesterday (20.00) it was transferred to T1 lost property, as T3 do not have lost property.

Whilst I recognise that the (initial and eventual) location of the instrument is not Flybe’s doing, the lack of staff (both from Flybe and Manchester Airport incidentally) being available to communicate properly with me from the beginning (both at the time I left it and after it went missing) meant that I’ve gone through unnecessary stress due to lack of transparency with information and procedures.

On the day itself not at any point did the member of staff seem inclined to make doubly sure myself/my baggage was taken care of, despite my asking questions to try to make sure it was put where it should have been; I don’t fly often, so how am I supposed to know what to do instinctively? Osmosis?<

That night, once I realised the bass wasn’t where it should have been, I reported it to the first member of staff I could see; the gentleman was very helpful and did all he could to get in contact with Manchester airport, but there was no reply at first to his email. He said I should get home and get some sleep and he would leave notes for his colleague for tomorrow’s (Monday’s) shift.

I took to twitter in the morning to try and get Flybe’s attention to start looking, because by this point I had no IDEA what was going on (phonelines were jammed due to the weather); I hoped that their agent on twitter might be able to help, but no answers were forthcoming. In the end it took my mentor Sarah Watts getting involved. She contacted Mr Lebrecht, who was kind enough to post about it to try and get some sort of light shed on the issue.