Can you please describe what scenario you imagine an airtag would be useful in tracking down a stolen item in an airport?
I ask because I'm at a loss. BLE from these little devices has ~40ft of range on a good day, and even if a mesh network were involved, I fail to see what the airtag could do that would help you recover your item. Sound an alarm? Great, the thief knows where it is now, and they can just yank it out and throw it in the trash. Give you GPS coordinates? Great, that'll really help after you find security, tell them what happened, convince them it's urgent, and explain to them what they're looking at when you show them the app. Of course that all assumes the airtag (or a nearby mesh device) has a useful GPS fix, and the thief hasn't already found the tag and thrown it in a trash can or something.
Imagine you put an AirTag somewhere deep into your suitcase, and someone malicious steals it and then drives off with it. With the current model, the thief will get notified there’s an AirTag traveling with them, and they can play a sound, find it and remove it / disable it.
Imo without these features it would be rather unlikely for a thief to find AirTags quickly or even realize it’s there.
The ~40ft range is more than enough, the global mesh network of all iPhones is the whole point of the AirTags, there’s no “gps fix”.
So we're in agreement about the technical situation at hand - rely on nearby devices' location data. This should work fine in most airports, sure.
I'm still stuck on all of the friction involved in actually using airtags as a theft recovery device. Neither the tag or Apple's service can contact police or airport security on its own, so you're spending who-knows-how-long flagging down security, explaining the situation, and waiting for them to relay that message back to an appropriate authority who will go find the thief.
Alternatively, you skip the "talk to security" part entirely and go find the thief yourself (assuming you're comfortable with that sort of confrontation). You're still dealing with a moving target - one that can very easily leave the airport entirely, forcing you to choose between sacrificing your bag and potentially missing your flight, a cab, etc.
You also run into a proliferation issue. The more popular airtags become as a theft-recovery device, the more thieves will know to look for them and remove them from stolen items.
Google Maps generally shows my location inside of airport terminals pretty accurately, so it stands to reason that the network of iPhones in a terminal could plot a tracker's position pretty well. If someone has your bag and you know which direction they're moving, you could possibly catch up and get close enough to either spot it or (assuming you have an iPhone 11+) get a Ultra Wide Band fix to finish pinpointing it.
Bury the tracker somewhere too inconvenient to locate and remove quickly, and they'll count on not removing it until later (or they'll just ditch it once it starts beeping).
I ask because I'm at a loss. BLE from these little devices has ~40ft of range on a good day, and even if a mesh network were involved, I fail to see what the airtag could do that would help you recover your item. Sound an alarm? Great, the thief knows where it is now, and they can just yank it out and throw it in the trash. Give you GPS coordinates? Great, that'll really help after you find security, tell them what happened, convince them it's urgent, and explain to them what they're looking at when you show them the app. Of course that all assumes the airtag (or a nearby mesh device) has a useful GPS fix, and the thief hasn't already found the tag and thrown it in a trash can or something.