Many of you may think the Americans with Disabilities Act from 1990 has allowed for people with disabilities to have access to Air Travel or made it so planes would have to be accessible to be berthed out of the US. But this is a myth. Airplanes are not accessible. The Air Carrier Access Act was actually passed in 1986 by Reagan which meant airlines could no longer refuse to allow disabled passengers flights. However Airlines were not forced to make the airplanes themselves mobility aid friendly and being corporations without legislation requiring it they have remained inaccessible to people with a variety of disabilities. Now you may think well they must be Iâve seen people in those wheelchairs at the gate. Well let me explain why that is not real access.
Firstly we cannot use our mobility aids to board, they get checked in with regular luggage and are often broken or lost. There is a misconception amongst the able bodied that our mobility aids are simply devices or tools that can be readily replaced.
Most wheelchairs are custom made for the user and very expensive and even if money is no object they take time to be made most of the prominent domestic manufacturers have a waitlist of 3-6 months some more specialized have a longer wait.
Secondly we are forced to ride in what is known as an aisle chair which as it is something only a small portion of passengers need they are often missing or in great disrepair. The aisle chair I can only describe as a human hand truck, it is a very narrow seat with a high back that we are then strapped into. Usually in my experience like a bad shopping cart one of the wheels makes the chair skew in one direction meaning a very bumpy ride as the porters load us on the plane and the porters are usually not accustomed to driving it making it more of a struggle. I am a paraplegic and the way the straps work my knees still splay outwards getting knocked into everything we pass, especially on the way off the plane. Yes I have no sensation but my bones are actually very brittle from having been a paraplegic for so many years and recovering from an injury below my spinal cord injury takes a lot more time and I am at high risk for infections and other complications.
Thirdly once on the plane we usually have no access to the lavatory, only 4% of flights out of the US have an âaccessible lavatoryâ which their definition of accessible lavatory does not meet the ADA requirements of any other business. What an accessible lavatory means on a plane is that there is an aisle chair on board and you can be pushed into the closet sized facility in the chair having the door shut behind you. Meaning once inside you have no space to transfer or do anything and you canât open the door behind you, you are completely reliant on the attendants.
Finally when the airline inevitably damages or loses your chair or other mobility the process of getting it repaired or replaced takes months to get approved and then however long the replacement or repair itself will take. So if you are a manual chair user like myself you will be put in a bulky cumbersome hospital chair which is made to be pushed by someone versus independent use the whole time you wait. If you are a power chair user you will be put in a loaner powerchair and the shop usually just has one so it is beat up wonât hold a charge things fall off and donât support you and again it will be much bulkier than you are used to. If this chair means your house, car, job is no longer accessible tough they wonât cover any of those costs. You may think being in an unsuitable chair is merely an inconvenience it is not. Engracia Figueroa who I quoted above died as a result she was a quadriplegic and unable to properly adjust herself she developed a pressure ulcer and died from resulting infection. When Delta broke my chair in January 2020 I was working as a automotive technician and I was unable to do my job from that chair so I had to man the desk if I had an unreasonable employer I would have had to stay home until my chair was fixed. The chair was super wide and wouldnât fit in my bathroom so I had to transfer to the floor and crawl to use my own bathroom. I couldnât self load my chair so my roommates would have to help me get in my car and then when I got to work a colleague would have to come get me out of the car. As dependent as the unsuitable chair made me a relatively healthy paraplegic imagine what it does to a quadriplegic?
