I have no plans to fly anywhere anytime soon. And that’s OK with me.
My relationship with flying has always been love/hate. Actually, it’s more like a willing-to-tolerate-out-of-necessity/hate relationship. I grudgingly acknowledge that if I want to travel beyond a certain distance, flying becomes unavoidable. And I love going to new places and seeing new people and things, so I suck it up and fly.
Maybe someday we’ll advance to where humans can transport ourselves as they do on Star Trek, by disintegrating at one point and reintegrating at another, or on The Wizard of Oz, by donning ruby slippers and clicking the heels together while wishing hard. When that day dawns, I’ll gladly swear off flying once and for all. But until then, I’m stuck.
Just about every wheelchair user who has flown even occasionally has an airline horror story.
My fear of flying is born of the standard anxieties. Realizing that I’m hurtling through the atmosphere in a metal tube is a jarring existential blast, like an air horn honked in my ear from point-blank range. And, these days, if one factors in the likelihood that this metal tube is teeming with airborne coronaviruses that are jockeying for the pole position in their mad quest to be inhaled, the stress is redoubled.
Because I use a motorized wheelchair, the stress is retripled. (Did I just coin a word?) Here’s the drill when I fly: At boarding time, an airline gate employee escorts me down the jetway to the entrance of the plane. Waiting for me is an aisle chair, which is basically a hand truck with a seat and three seatbelts. It’s used to haul people who can’t walk to their seat on the airliner. Thus, it’s narrow enough to fit down the aisle of a plane, which is pretty damn narrow.
Also awaiting me are the humans who help transfer me to and from the aisle chair. I’m sure you’ve seen those poor, grossly underpaid souls who push people through the terminals in airport-issued wheelchairs. They’re the ones who pull aisle-chair duty.
Once they plop me into the aisle chair, they fasten the seatbelts across my lap, waist, and shoulders. Then they tilt the chair back onto its rear wheels and haul me down the aisle. My thighs bulge out over the sides of the narrow chair and brush against the passenger seats as we pass.
Creative Commons
Airport crew members loading a wheelchair onto an airplane.
Meanwhile, someone from the baggage crew, usually a burly man wearing a fluorescent construction worker’s vest and noise-canceling headphones, hauls away my empty wheelchair. My chair is loaded into the cargo hold along with the luggage.
Even after our plane returns to sweet terra firma at the destination airport, I can’t relax and feel that I’ve arrived safely until I am reunited in the jetway with my wheelchair and can see that it, too, has emerged from the journey intact and operational. Until that moment, I play an exhausting game of whack-a-mole during the flight against an onslaught of horrifying pop-up fantasies of my chair being returned to me as a smoldering, mangled pile of bolts. Or maybe my wheelchair won’t be there to greet me at all. Maybe it was lost or accidentally loaded into the luggage hold of a flight to Indonesia.
These are not unfounded fears.
The federal government didn’t start requiring commercial airlines to report their mishandling of wheelchairs during flights until the end of 2018, but the numbers are revealing. In 2019, the first full year of reporting, 10,548 wheelchairs were reported lost, damaged, delayed, or stolen. That averages out to about twenty-nine wheelchairs per day. In the fifteen months after that, another 4,176 chairs were reported as mishandled.
Just about every wheelchair user who has flown even occasionally has an airline horror story. I once had a connector cord completely ripped out of one of my motors, rendering my chair inoperable. Fortunately for me, this happened at the end of my trip, and my backup wheelchair was at home. I rode around in my backup while my wheelchair was being repaired.
But suppose this happened at the beginning of my trip. I very well may have been stranded for days, far away from home and my backup wheelchair. Many airline horror stories are depressing accounts of people being immobilized for the duration of their vacation, business trip, or honeymoon.
Of course, getting a wheelchair repaired is expensive. Airlines are required to foot the bill for the cost of restoring the wheelchairs they damage by the federal Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 (more on this later). But even so, it can take weeks to get a wheelchair repaired, so what does the user do in the meantime?
The consequences can be dire. The death of wheelchair user and activist Engracia Figueroa this past fall is a case in point. Figueroa was a member of Hand in Hand, an organization that advocates for the rights of domestic workers. After her death, Hand in Hand released a statement attributing her death “to complications from injuries she sustained when United Airlines destroyed her custom wheelchair last July.”
According to the statement, when Figueroa returned home to Los Angeles on a flight from Washington, D.C., she discovered her motorized wheelchair was mangled beyond repair. So she had to sit in one of those standard airport wheelchairs for four hours. “Her struggle to maintain her balance over that length of time in the faulty device led to the development of a pressure sore. When she was finally able to return home, she experienced acute pain, and was admitted to the hospital shortly after,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, Figueroa had to use a “loaner” wheelchair. That happens often when a wheelchair is out of service for an extended period of time. The company doing the repair will give you an off-the-rack wheelchair to use in the interim. But one-size-fits-all doesn’t apply to wheelchairs any more than it applies to pants. Wheelchair users, like everyone else, come in all shapes and sizes. The seating of our chairs is customized to provide our particular bodies with maximum support, since we sit in our chairs all day, every day.
Thus, Figueroa was using a wheelchair that wasn’t properly fitted for her. “This further exacerbated her pressure sore, and caused muscle spasms, severe edema, and an inability to eat, as well as two additional hospitalizations,” the statement said. “The sore became infected, and the infection eventually reached her hip bone, requiring emergency surgery to remove the infected bone and tissue.”
On October 31, Figueroa died due to complications from an infected ulcer caused by her ordeal. She was fifty-one.
U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, uses a wheelchair and has felt the pain and anger of having it broken by airlines, too.
“I probably see damage to my own wheelchair about every third flight that I take,” she said in an interview with PBS NewsHour on December 21, 2021. “Imagine if it was a human being, somebody’s leg. Like, we were to say that, every third flight you took, the airlines broke your leg. People would be absolutely appalled.”
The Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 has made it a lot easier for wheelchair users and other disabled folks to fly. Among other things, it prohibits U.S. airlines from refusing to serve anyone on the basis of a disability or from requiring disabled passengers to be accompanied, or from limiting the number of disabled passengers on a flight.
But the law doesn’t give people who need mobility devices the right to remain in them while flying. And I believe that airlines will continue to break mobility devices by the boatload until those of us who use wheelchairs can continue sitting in them on commercial airliners.
Last September, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a study concluding that the majority of U.S. passenger airplanes could accommodate secured wheelchairs by removing two consecutive rows of seats near the boarding doors. The report says the idea of configuring airliners to accommodate wheelchairs warrants more research.
So let’s get that research underway. I’m sure airline execs will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into making a change like that. There’s a reason why aisles are so tight and leg room is so stingy on their planes. They want to cram in as many revenue-generating passenger seats as they possibly can.
But time’s up. Nobody else besides airlines can get away with making wheelchair users part with our wheelchairs. Many years ago, I went to see a ballet. The usher escorted me to my seat, which was a regular theater seat on the aisle. He said I would have to transfer into the seat and he would take my wheelchair away and bring it back after the performance. I refused. The usher said I couldn’t sit in the aisle in my wheelchair because I’d be a fire hazard. I still refused. They ended up putting me and my party in an accessible box.
Thanks to laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act, if I’m treated like that at a theater today, I can sue them big time. That’s because theaters have an obligation to accommodate me without separating me from my wheelchair, which is why they now have accessible seating areas.
It’s time for the airlines to figure out how to accommodate us, too.