Be afraid, wheelchairs on a plane

_{Elly Desmarchelier, wearing a bright blue jacket and in her power chair, speaking with Alan Joyce, the former CEO of QANTAS, who is holding a cup of coffee and has taken a knee to speak to her and have a conversation face to face.}

At last week’s Open Dialogue we quickly learned that if you mention disabled people and air travel in the same sentence, your chat discussion is going to blow up. 

One of our panellists, Emma Bennison, raised the provocation – why do airports hate disabled people? 

Well, didn’t our audience agree with the premise of the question. We were instantly flooded with people’s airline horror stories.  

Booking dilemmas, broken wheelchairs and worst of all lots of injuries from falling out of airline aides. 

Everyone had a story of being treated badly by an Australian airliner. Interestingly, their experiences overseas had been significantly better, so it is possible to make air travel more accessible. 

I was astounded by the ferocity of the anger, but not surprised it was an issue. 

I’ve had my own issues with travelling by flight before. It takes me an hour to book a flight. By the time I call up and tell them all the details they need about my wheelchair, its battery, how I walk onto the plane… it’s a rigmarole. 

But somehow that doesn’t prevent it all going wrong when I get to the airport. 

The airline Gods had clearly heard our attack on them last week, because when I attempted to fly home on the weekend of course things went very badly. 

I had done my due diligence and told QANTAS all about my chair and its battery when I booked my flight, but when I checked in there was a “problem”. Another electric wheelchair user had checked in before me. 

Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but in Australia, you can only fly one electric wheelchair on a flight at any time. 

That’s right. One wheelchair per flight. So I was kicked off my flight. 

We can fly people on moon missions, but we can’t fly two electric wheelchairs on a plane at the same time. 

Now before someone mansplains the situation to me. I know it’s about the design of the hull and the risk of fire from the batteries. 

But these are archaic rules made decades ago when wheelchair designs were completely different. Also, just design the hull differently. Expect more than one wheelchair on a plane. Do better. 

Upgrades don’t seem so hard when they’re to make first class more luxurious or to allow more laptops on planes, which by the way have a lot of batteries in them. 

It’s about priorities and until the airlines make accessibility a priority, disabled people are going to feel like they hate us. And why wouldn’t we?