Flying the Unfriendly Skies

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Two Broken Chairs, One Mission

I wasn’t looking for a platform. The platform came looking for me. When I was booking my first post-injury flight in the spring of 2016, a cross-country trip from Seattle to the East Coast for United Spinal’s Roll on Capitol Hill, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

The dream vacation I spent months planning and thousands of dollars on in travel and lodging for my girlfriend, two caregivers, and me turned into every wheelchair traveler’s worst nightmare when United Airlines damaged my head-controlled Invacare TDX so badly that I wound up spending 11 of the 14 days without it at all.

Not even one calendar year later, Alaska Airlines caused $16,000 in damage to another wheelchair on my way back from ROCH 2017. Once is a case of bad luck. Twice is the universe revealing your path. Having two wheelchairs destroyed by two different airlines in the span of a year has a way of thrusting you into a bit of reluctant advocacy with a lot of questions that need answers.

How is it that in the year 2017, in the age of one-day Amazon Prime delivery of damn near anything you desire, a full 27 years since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that airplanes in America are not wheelchair accessible? Why is it so hard to transport wheelchairs safely? What kind of recourse does someone like me have to hold the airlines accountable when they break what are essentially my legs? What is being done to address what seems to be a systemic issue within the industry?

To answer those questions, I tried to finagle my way behind the curtain of the airline industry, chat with wheelchair travelers with far more expertise than my own, and take a look back more than three decades to see where this pattern of negligence began and what, if anything, is being done to address it.


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