Illustration created by artist Damaris Contreras.
The first day of spring break: I post a picture on my Instagram story out the window of my airplane seat, sharing my VSCO filtered clouds with a sparkle emoji. This picture’s been taken a thousand times before, and in a way, I am simply doing my duty as a social media addicted white girl. Now everyone knows I’m traveling, and they’re prepared for the endless bikini pics they’ll soon be bombarded with. The most basic image, my airplane window picture, is familiar to anyone who has ever traveled. What’s not familiar to them are the hours of worry, stress, and dehumanization that come with flying as a disabled person.
The process of getting into my seat and being able to take that well-known picture requires months of preplanning, countless conversations, and clarifications with strangers working at the airline, and saying goodbye to my freedom—my wheelchair—as it is carted off into cargo by employees who seldom realize the importance of the item they are now responsible for. Anyone else could decide to go spend their spring break by a pool with their friends, book a flight, walk onto an airplane and wait patiently to arrive at their destination. Disabled people with mobility aids, on the other hand, are forced to give up the devices that keep them comfortable, rely on the hands of strangers to assist them in entering the plane, and spend their flight hoping that their wheelchair comes back to them in one piece.
Put frankly, I am frustrated. I am frustrated that there is a world full of adventures waiting for me to explore, and I am frustrated that I am separated from this world by inaccessibility. I am frustrated that as a traveler, I am responsible for making sure the airline I am paying knows how to do their job. I am frustrated that I am forced to tolerate my wheelchair being thrown around, broken, or lost. I am frustrated that employees are not trained on how to properly assist me in an airplane and that I must completely submit to the help of strangers to make it onto an airplane that is uncomfortable enough, to begin with. This is not the pretty part of traveling—this is not the side of traveling I post pictures of on my Instagram story.
Until now, I’ve accepted the inadequate crumbs of accommodation that airlines have bothered to toss my way. I figured that anxiety, injuries, and broken wheelchairs were my own fault for choosing to fly anywhere at all. I figured complaining would do no good, and my qualms with flying wouldn’t make sense to others anyway. After all—everyone else is content with their air travel. They don’t have to worry about whether the airline will be in a rush to get them on the plane and subsequently drop them on the floor. They don’t have to worry about staying on hold for four hours to make sure the airline will have someone ready to help them get onto the plane. They don’t need to worry about what they will do if their only form of mobility is destroyed or lost upon landing in their destination. Everyone else can simply travel.
I bring up being “dropped on the floor” consciously, not as a hyperbolic anecdote but as an indication of how disabled people are really treated by airline companies. In preparation for my most recent trip (the aforementioned spring break), I phoned my airline to inform them I was disabled, and that I’d need them to have a lift system available for me to get into the plane. This lift system is a relatively newer feature that larger airports have been offering for a few years now. Using this lift, I don’t have to be physically picked up or carried by any airline staff, which makes me as a passenger more comfortable. After waiting on hold for a total of four hours, including being transferred from person to person on account of them not knowing how to help me, the Air Canada medical desk answered me. After asking that the lift system please be ready for my flight the following day, I was cut off and told that the airline no longer offers that service. When I became audibly confused, caught off guard, and stressed out by the fact that the travel plans I was comfortable with had been changed, I was given this explanation: the company no longer offers the option to use the lift system because they’ve had issues with it recently. The issues were that employees had not been trained how to use the lift properly (but used it anyway) and consequently dropped passengers onto the floor.
These were the precise words used to tell me that I would not be helped in the way I needed—these were the words used to tell me that instead of training their employees to not physically injure disabled passengers, they’d instead simply not help us in that way anymore. I was assured that someone would show up to lift me manually, which made my stomach turn having just read multiple articles about lawsuits against that very company for picking up disabled passengers incorrectly and without warning.
In this moment, when every other university student preparing to go on spring break with their best friends would be packing, prepping, or simply getting excited about the trip that lay ahead—I started crying. I cried because I was scared, I cried because I was frustrated, and I cried because companies care so little for their disabled customers that we are told directly and without hesitation that they drop people like us on the floor.
I face inaccessibility everywhere I go, every day of my life. There is no single instance of inaccessibility in my life that is as nerve-wracking as air travel. The physical and attitudinal barriers that prevent disabled people from flying with the same ease as able bodied people can completely traumatize us, but go unnoticed by everyone else. Airlines have not been forced to adopt better customer service or accessibility for people with disabilities, because they’ve never been held accountable. It’s hard for able bodied people to recognize that what comes as a convenient luxury to them instead comes as a frightening and discouraging experience for disabled flyers. In the same way, that inaccessibility in our everyday lives can only be solved with the help of able-bodied allies recognizing existing obstacles and asking what they personally can do to help eliminate them—the first step towards more accessible, safe, and comfortable air travel for disabled people is having others recognize what we actually endure and asking themselves if they believe it is fair.
