Mark P. MostertCorporations, including airlines, exist to make a profit for their shareholders. One way of ensuring significant profit margins is to provide outstanding customer service.
In the middle of the holiday season, millions of people will travel by air. These days air travel is almost uniformly a trying experience for everyone, and even more so for people with disabilities. In most airports, for example, they battle massive check-in crowds, often struggle to get through airport security and sometimes have to negotiate very long distances from one gate to another. On planes they are up against tiny bathrooms, tight seat spaces, enplaning and deplaning issues, crowded flights and untrained transportation staff.
Making air travel efficient and safe for passengers with disabilities would seem to be a no-brainer – and even offer the airlines that embrace them a competitive advantage.
But the airline industry apparently didn’t get the memo. Recent reports make clear that passengers with disabilities are not a priority for airlines, despite the usual cosmetic acknowledgement that people with disabilities actually exist.
Here are some recent highlights, or more aptly said, lowlights:
- One passenger uses a wheelchair and a portable ventilator to breathe. Prior to arriving at the airport, she provided the airline with extensive medical documentation to smooth the way. When she checked in, that information had gone missing. After the documentation issue was finally resolved, things just got worse. Hapless flight attendants and ground staff repeatedly disconnected her ventilator tube as they tried to manhandle her onto the plane. They also dropped part of a lifting device on her head. All of this before a grueling nine-hour flight. Her return trip wasn’t much better. After her ordeal, she noted that she “did not feel safe.” Probably the understatement of the year.
- Another passenger, flying home with his wife after an anniversary trip, needed help getting off the plane. A wheelchair user with cerebral palsy and unable to walk, he was forced to literally drag himself off a flight after cabin staff informed him that there wasn’t enough time to get him a modified airport wheelchair to help him deplane. He ended up dragging himself from row 12, his wife crawling behind to help him as all the other passengers looked on.
- One more travel nightmare: A young man, also with cerebral palsy, was accustomed to being lifted from his airplane seat using a special lift. When the specialized contraption was unavailable, ground crew insisted that they could manually strong-arm the passenger out of his seat. Predictably, doing so was a struggle, and it took over an hour and a half to get him off the plane. Ground crew finally dropped him while trying to get him out of his seat. He then spent several days in bed recovering from his ordeal.
In all these instances the airlines issued the usual bland apologies. These experiences might have been unsurprising had they happened 50 years ago when very few, if any corporations and businesses were aware of people with disabilities.
In 2023, it’s not acceptable.
Some points to consider:
- Why aren’t airline personnel better trained in accommodating passengers with disabilities?
- Do all airlines have a comprehensive, documented plan for accommodating passengers with a wide variety of disabilities?
- Why does it take unsettling events to get airlines’ attention?
People with disabilities spend billions of dollars each year in disposable income, they deserve much better from airlines – and every other corporation.
At Able Americans we believe in innovative solutions for people with disabilities that harness the free market, emphasize individual freedom and choice and remove barriers to progress.
It’s imperative that corporations, airlines included, meet the challenge of accommodating and supporting people with disabilities using free market approaches and common sense.
Mark P. Mostert is senior researcher at Able Americans, the National Center for Public Policy Research’s project to support Americans living with intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities.
So what you’re saying is the rest of us all need to pay more so that airlines can make accommodations for the few disabled people. Just like the 2-story office my company is is in, which has an entirely pointless elevator and over-sized bathrooms increasing our cost due to ADA requirements. Southwest is already giving away additional seats to people whose “disability” is obesity. This costs everyone else on that plane more. What’s next? Huge, ADA-compliant bathrooms taking up more space on every airliner?
Less than five years ago when I was 78 (I’d walk ~ 30 miles a week at a good pace), I would have agreed with you.
I always got annoyed, sometimes vocally, when someone with weaker legs or poor balance passing in the aisle grabbed hold of my seatback to steady themselves, one of those people must have cursed me.
Today I must use a walker, my BMI is 24 (not obese), and the meds I have to take require toilet use about every two hours when I’m lucky and drink a minimum amount of fluids.
For me, standing upright in an airplane toilet is an interesting exercise (I could never be a sitzpinkler) and I pray, religiously, as I work my way back towards the toilet, grabbing on to seat backs, that there’s only one person waiting online in front of me.
This has resulted in less travel by air and more automobile travel; more frequent stops at gas stations to fill the tank (and empty mine) are not a burden
And I’m certain the airlines don’t even notice the loss of income.
You too will become older and weaker one day – and it will happen a lot sooner than you think.
I wonder how you’ll cope…
It seems irrational, frankly speaking, to insist mass transit (including airline companies such as Southwest, United, Frontier, Alaska, etc) become qualified and invested in mobile medical services for ventilated, chair-bound patients. Free seats for fat bodies isn’t enough?
Airlines are not a public service.
And the people who work for them are not trained health care associates. I reject the assumption that physical and mental disabilities must be accommodated by any/all venues and those (sadly) disabled need not expect any limit in their activities related to the disability.