"I can't send you anything," she said. "I know. I want to be very clear that I have not sent you anything and I'm not going to." Understood. So, I'm going to tell you a story about a woman I've never named.
Roz's voice was dry. Eight months ago, in a gate area, a passenger got into it with a mother traveling with a small child and a stroller. Tell him Coach Truth just went national. Alleged the family was in the wrong boarding group. They weren't.
It got loud. Gate agent intervened. Passenger was documented and released to travel because being unpleasant in a gate area isn't a denial of boarding offense. And and about a year before that on a different route, the same passenger record has a note about a complaint regarding, and I'm quoting the agents phrasing, not mine, the type of passenger being upgraded. Terrence closed his eyes.
Ros, I've told you nothing. You've told me nothing. What I will say, Roz said on the record in writing, if you want it, is that if a carrier were to contact us, stating they had barred an individual for physical contact with a minor in custody, we would consider that grounds to review our own record on that individual. That's not a favor. That's just what we do.
Would you like a letter? I'd love a letter, Roz said. The letter went out on a Monday. It contained no accusations, no evidence, and no requests. It stated that Kestrel Air had issued a lifetime carriage ban to a named individual following a documented incident involving physical contact with an unaccompanied minor and that the incident was supported by 17 witness statements and cabin footage.
That was all it did. That was all it needed to do. The second carrier's ban arrived at Margarite Vance's house in January. The third arrived in March from an airline she had flown twice because the second carrier had a code share relationship and code share relationships have information sharing clauses that most passengers have never read. She had by the end of March been barred by three of the five carriers that served her city.
Nobody had convicted her of anything. Nobody ever would. There was no arrest, no charge, no record, no court date, no headline. If you had run a background check on Margarite Vance in April, you would have found a 58-year-old woman with excellent credit and a clean history. She simply could no longer get on most airplanes.
The volunteer thing was the part she never saw coming. She had been reading to children at a hospital for 11 years, every Tuesday and every second Saturday in the pediatric wing in a chair with a stack of picture books. It was the only unpaid thing she did and the only thing in her life she had never once been cynical about. The coordinator called her in April. They did an annual rescreening.