China Airlines Reunites Long Lost Camera & Photographer

China Airlines Reunites Long Lost Camera & Photographer

What happens when an employee finds “something strange” on a beach in Taiwan and took a closer look and realized “Oh this is a camera.” Well, if you are China Airlines, you start a worldwide campaign to find the owner so as to reunite them with the photos still on the camera.

The Canon camera, which after 5 and a half years later, covered in barnacles, managed to perfectly preserve the memory card still inside. “We checked the memory card and found lots of pictures” says Bruce Chen, General Manager of the China Airlines Honolulu Branch

The pictures are from an August 2007 diving trip in Kaanapali, Hawaii where perhaps, the camera drifted away, and the owner wrote it off as gone for good. Until it washed ashore over half a decade later, more than six thousand miles away, on the eastern coast of Taiwan.

Spotting a PR opportunity, the airline launched the worldwide campaign on Facebook to reunite the camera with the owner and can give her the surprise of her life. It went viral and was picked up by news channels around the world.

Part of this charitable campaign was to provide the owner, now identified as Lindsay Scallan with an open ticket from China Airlines to pick up the camera in person in Taiwan.