From NextAvenue.org —
Custom-made wheelchairs are lost every day, and some disability activists are calling for accountability and reform
Every time Asim Dietrich, a staff attorney for the Arizona Center for Disability Law, has flown with his custom, motorized wheelchair, the airline has damaged it.
The damage, however, is the least of his problems.
“Most people with disabilities have custom wheelchairs because we are all different and have different conditions,” said Dietrich, who has relied on a ventilator and motorized wheelchair for 20 years so he can lead an independent life.
Although airlines are obligated by federal law to repair or replace damaged chairs, “scheduling repairs can be very time consuming because there are a limited number of companies that actually provide and service wheelchairs,” he said. “So, an individual with a damaged wheelchair can often wait for weeks, or even months, for the repair to be scheduled and completed.”
Dietrich recalled a time when his wheelchair was damaged on a flight from his home in Phoenix to Baltimore, where he was scheduled to attend a weeklong conference.
“The airline told me they would not be able to get the item repaired for several weeks, so I spent the week in Baltimore unable to drive my chair,” Dietrich said.
He was forced to rely on his caregiver to navigate him around the conference. His chair was finally repaired about two weeks after he returned home.
Lost or Damaged Property and No Accountability
Roughly 5.5 million people rely on wheelchairs, but those who take to the skies to travel report that airlines often seem to have little regard for the importance of their wheelchairs to their mobility and independence.
Wheelchair-reliant flyers generally must surrender their chairs to airline baggage claim representatives, who are responsible for delivering them intact to their destination. But that doesn’t always happen.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), roughly 29 wheelchairs and scooters were either damaged or lost every day in 2019. That was the first full year such complaints were compiled. And an average of 32 chairs and scooters were damaged or lost every day in January and February 2020, according to DOT figures, the most-recent time periods before the COVID-19 pandemic caused travel to plummet.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was charged with compiling data beginning in 2011, but it took a 2018 funding amendment by Illinois Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth for information about wheelchair and scooter damage to finally be collected and released.
Duckworth lost both legs and some use of her right arm when the helicopter she piloted crashed in 2004 while she was deployed with the U.S. Army in Iraq.
“I know from personal experience that when an airline damages a wheelchair, it is more than a simple inconvenience — it’s a complete loss of mobility and independence,” Duckworth said in a 2018 statement. “It was the equivalent of taking my legs away from me again.”