Where did you hear that they banned them for 24 hours?
When we were in Florida, the news reports say that THEY chose not to fly home that day because they wanted NON-STOP flights.
See the links I posted at #91. They may have chosen not to fly out via another airline that day, due to lack of non-stop flights (remember, they said the girl's ears hurt during landing on the first flight to their vacation destination, so they probably wanted to minimize that), but they did not have the option of flying out on an AirTran flight later the same day.