Adise said, "You're heavier. Both of those are worth having. Neither one of you gets to decide the other ones is better." Dileia Marsh flew for three more months and then took a leave of absence. Not because of 812, because of what 812 turned out to have been holding up.
She'd been fine functionally for 3 years. She'd worked 1100 flights and slept badly and told herself it was resolved. And then she'd spent 90 seconds in an aisle doing the thing she should have done 3 years earlier and the doing of it had knocked something loose that the not doing had been keeping in place. She sat in a therapist's office in December and said out loud for the first time to anyone. I did everything right on that flight 3 years ago.
I followed the procedure exactly. And a girl I was worried about walked off my airplane and nine weeks later something happened to somebody else. And you think that's your fault? No. Dileia's hands were flat on her knees. No. I've done 3 years of knowing it's not my fault.
That's not the part. What's the part? The part is that I was right. She looked at the window. I knew.
I looked at that man and I knew and I did the correct professional thing which is monitor and document. And being right was worth nothing because I never said it out loud. The therapist waited and on A12 I said it out loud," Dileia said. And an entire cabin applauded me for it. And I stood there in that doorway.
And I wanted to tell every single one of them that this wasn't bravery. This was a woman paying off a debt to a 12-year-old she never even learned the name of. She came back to flying in March. She still reads every service note on every flight. She's crouched in the aisle beside a lot of unaccompanied minors since.
She's never once told any of them why. Terrence Okaffor put a proposal in front of Kestrel Air's operations committee in February. It was extremely boring. It was four pages and it proposed adding a single field to the crew incident reporting form. A checkbox indicating that an incident involved a passenger's conduct toward a minor, an unaccompanied minor, or a passenger traveling with young children.
That was it. One checkbox because the thing he could not stop thinking about was three entries on a 4-year record that each said no action taken, three notes filed correctly by three competent people into a system with no way of ever putting them side by side. The committee approved it in April. It went live in September. It is not a story.