There is a sad ritual that pretty much every disabled person winds up going through sooner or later.
It’s the dehydration ritual. People who use wheelchairs engage in it when we fly on commercial airlines, especially for long distances. We know that for however long that flight takes, the odds are high that we won’t be able to pee, because the tiny bathrooms on the plane will not be accessible. Hell, I imagine those bathrooms are barely accessible for people who don’t use wheelchairs. If you’re taller than average and you’re sitting on the bowl, I bet your knees press against the back of the closed door.
Suhyeon Choi/CC0
Airplane aisle during flight.
When someone who uses a wheelchair has to board a commercial aircraft, we must relinquish our wheelchair because it won’t fit down the narrow aisle. We have to sit in a passenger seat like everyone else and our wheelchair is taken away and stored in the luggage bay. If we must get up and go pee during the flight, we can ask a flight attendant to bring us the on-board wheelchair which is designed to fit down the aisle. But that doesn’t do any good if the wheelchair doesn’t fit in the bathroom.
I know that when I fly I usually don’t drink anything, with the goal of not needing to pee until after I arrive at my destination. The longer the flight, the more essential it is for me to dehydrate.
But, hopefully a change is coming so that future generations of commercial airline passengers who use wheelchairs won’t have to undertake this ritual.
In July, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a rule requiring all airplanes with a single aisle to have accessible bathrooms. As the rule points out, airplanes with two aisles are already required to have accessible bathrooms under the federal Air Carriers Access Act, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in airline service. “However,” the rule also states, “single-aisle aircraft are increasingly used by airlines for long-haul flights . . . . The percentage of flights between 1,500 and 3,000 miles flown by single-aisle aircraft increased from less than 40 percent in 1991 to 86 percent in 2021. These flights can last four or more hours.”
Maybe disabled airline passengers won’t have to fret about not being able to pee in flight a few decades from now.
The rule also says, “While accessible lavatory options do exist in the marketplace, airlines have largely chosen to forgo them in favor of an additional row of seats or extra galley space.”
When I say that perhaps generations of disabled people won’t have to go through the dehydration ritual in the future, I’m talking about the distant future. The mandate for accessible bathrooms will apply to new single-aisle aircraft with 125 seats or more ordered ten years, or delivered twelve years, after the effective date of the rule.
So maybe disabled airline passengers won’t have to fret about not being able to pee in flight a few decades from now—if climate change doesn’t do us all in first.