Originally Posted by
nmenaker
I have had the airtag on a checked bag ping me while in the aircraft before but while the bag was being loaded.. must have been the baggage handler's phone or something nearby that picked it up.. At the time I was in a window Polaris seat in the forward cabin and the bags were coming in to the forward baggage doors..
which makes me think, there must be SOME BTLE drain for phones which are around lots of airtags often, being the primary 'locating' device and communicating device to the cloud. I wonder if the baggage handlers and or check-in agents have seen or will see more battery drain due to all the tags people might ultimately be using for baggage tracking. Certainly an on the tarmac baggage operator is going to see the highest increase in these as they are probably more often around the MOST number of possible bags.
I don't believe so. It's just a handful of additional bytes being added to existing messages that are already being sent between the phones and the Apple cloud-based infrastructure on a regular basis. There's no 'primary' listener / receiver, every device will send everything it sees. These messages already include encrypted references to nearby iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, AirPods, etc. and have done for quite some time, in addition to the phone's own location data and other telemetry. The overhead from AirTags is negligible.