A Reprieve from Unfriendly Skies?
I recently went to the airport to pick up my wife. Her flight landed at 7 p.m., as scheduled. I waited outside at the arrival gate. But she didn’t make it to me until 9 p.m.
The first thing that held her up was that she had to remain in her seat on the plane until long after the other passengers had deboarded and were well on their way to their next destination. That’s because she had to wait for someone to fetch her motorized wheelchair.
When you use a wheelchair and fly on a commercial airline, you must give up your wheelchair and sit in your assigned seat. During the flight, the wheelchair is placed in the belly of the airplane, where the checked baggage goes.
If you need assistance getting from the place where you give up your wheelchair to your seat on the airplane, specially trained airport workers will be summoned to help you. If you can’t walk at all, they will put you in a different, very uncomfortable chair on wheels that’s narrow enough so to fit down the aisles of a commercial airplane. Then they will strap you down into this narrow chair like you are about to be executed and they will roll you backward down the aisle to your seat, which you will be lifted into if need be.
And when you arrive at your destination, this all happens again, only in reverse.
Because the process is so elaborate and crude, there are plenty of opportunities for someone to get hurt or something to go wrong. And that, of course, is what happened here. When my wife’s motorized chair was returned to her at the end of her flight, it was broken and wouldn’t move. So she then had to report the damage and do all the paperwork necessary for the airline company to have it replaced.
That’s why it took two hours for her to get to me as I waited by the arrival gate.
Sadly, it’s not unusual for airline passengers who have disabilities to experience this kind of hassle, or worse. In October, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced a $50 million penalty against American Airlines for “numerous serious violations of the laws protecting airline passengers with disabilities between 2019 and 2023,” according to a DOT press release.
The press release also said: “DOT’s investigation into American Airlines uncovered cases of unsafe physical assistance that at times resulted in injuries and undignified treatment of wheelchair users, in addition to repeated failures to provide prompt wheelchair assistance. American also mishandled thousands of wheelchairs by damaging them or delaying their return, leaving travelers without the device they need for mobility.”
It was the largest fine ever assessed to an airline company for violating federal laws and regulations protecting the rights of airline passengers with disabilities. And it came with a promise that real change is in the works.
“The era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in the release. “With this penalty, we are setting a new standard of accountability for airlines that violate the civil rights of passengers with disabilities. By setting penalties at levels beyond a mere cost of doing business for airlines, we’re aiming to change how the industry behaves and prevent these kinds of abuses from happening in the first place.”
Let’s hope that hitting airline companies hard in the pocketbook will do some good. Because hitting them in relatively smaller ways isn’t working. It was the second time this year that this airline company broke my wife’s wheelchair. Both times, the company had to pay to have it fixed. And it wasn’t even American.