After reading the comments, I'm starting to think that "returns without missing woman" isn't a bad headline. If you just said "returns without woman," it could mean that she deliberately got off and refused to get back on, for whatever reason. So I think the "missing" gives the information that this is a person who went missing. I think also that it gives the information that she is not known to be dead. There was a time when the press might have said: "ships looking for missing Air France plane." Well of course they wouldn't be looking for it if it wasn't missing. But now, they will say, "ships looking for downed Air France plane." So it is no longer missing, because we know what happened to it.

__________________
As above, so below