A US airline passenger who lost his iPad on board used a special app to find it, in the home of one of the flight attendants, police said.

The attendant, identified as 43-year-old Horizon Air employee Wendy Ronelle Dye, was arrested late Friday, said Bill Kler, spokesman for the Oregon City Police Department near the western state of Oregon's most populous city Portland.

The passenger was a Nevada man who used the Find My iPad app to locate his tablet after it went missing on the plane, Kler told AFP.

Dye told police that travelers on the aircraft said they found the tablet on a seat and gave it to her, and she had planned to turn it over to the airline eventually and had not used it, Kler said.

But police found personal information of hers on it, including her husband's birthday, said the spokesman.