JetBlue Travel Ban Shatters Veteran’s Career: Decorated Ex-Secret Service Agent Sues for Justice – View from the Wing

JetBlue Travel Ban Shatters Veteran’s Career: Decorated Ex-Secret Service Agent Sues for Justice

by Gary Leff on July 8, 2024

A former secret service member and “highly decorated military veteran” says he’s lost his career because JetBlue banned him after informing flight attendants that he was (lawfully) carrying a firearm with him on his flight to Florida.

He served in the military 23 years, became a secret service agent, and then a Department of Health and Human Services investigator. But, he says, since he’s banned from flying JetBlue he cannot travel for work.

• He’s required to fly JetBlue because they won the government contract for several routes
• JetBlue won’t let him fly
• So he couldn’t fly for work, and this ended his career.

The Bronze Star and Meritorious Service medal-winner says this had a “cascading and draconian effect on his life.”

He says that a JetBlue flight attendant claimed he failed to follow crewmember instructions, keeping his wife’s dog under their seat while traveling from Washington National airport to Fort Lauderdale on July 18, 2022.

While being scolded, he informed the crewmember that was “a legally armed federal law enforcement officer.” If I were that crewmember I’d likely have felt threatened. They wrote him up. He says that the airline’s investigation ultimately found that he wasn’t trying to intimidate the crewmember, but he remained on their No Fly List.

I don’t quite buy the damages here. I downloaded the city pairs and analyzed them.

• JetBlue has 264 contracts out of 13,372 negotiated routes. That includes to places like Tbilisi, Quito, Islamabad and Port-au-Prince.
• American Airlines has around half the routes. Being banned from American could present a problem!
• While federal employees, following their agency’s guidelines, usually will have to travel on the airline that won the GSA city pair that is not always true.
• Federal employees can take the train! They can also fly out of a different airport. For instance, JetBlue has the city pair for New York JFK – San Antonio, but not for Newark – San Antonio.

As a general matter anyway – and the specific processes and requirements can vary by agency – an employee can seek approval to travel on an alternative carrier for personal convenience provided it doesn’t incur additional cost to the government, and they should be able to travel on an alternate airline under exceptional circumstances such as a ban by the carrier. They’d likely need to properly document the ban and why it was given and obtain approval from their agency’s travel office or other appropriate authority within the agency.

Private sector employees also have to use contracted carriers at many big companies, although employees learn to game the system. Is the contracted airline cheaper? Just wait out booking the trip, the price may go up, and the non-contract (preferred) airline becomes sufficiently cheaper to be within policy. Or the fixed schedule of the trip just so happens to rule out travel on the corporate preferred carrier. Employees game their available travel times to avoid the schedule of the airline they don’t want to fly.

Surely the fact that an individual’s employer requires travel on a given airline as a job element, and the employee doesn’t qualify for such travel, doesn’t preclude the carrier from banning the traveler. At most it would mean they’re unqualified for the role – although there are usually alternatives. And the plaintiff would have some duty to minimize damages – if they’re equally employable elsewhere their ability to show harm will be limited.

The ultimate question here is whether JetBlue’s ban was wholly unjustified, and we’ve seen only one side of the argument. Even if it’s accurate that the traveler didn’t intend to intimidate crew they may have done so and that may be enough!

Clearly though Delta CEO Ed Bastian’s argument that a ban on one airline should be a ban from all airlines is stupid, though, because each airline has different standards and procedures for whether a passenger is welcome to fly them in the future, because it would be a massive anti-trust problem, as well as civil rights problem.

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