Grounded: Why Holding Airlines Accountable for Damaged Mobility Devices Matters

Most of us have felt it: that urge to go, to experience something different, to witness the lives lived in places vastly different from our home. It’s an ingrained and natural desire to explore, discover new places, and learn about unfamiliar cultures, traditions, landscapes, and histories.

Yet, the joy of travel is quite different from the experience of travelling. Airports can be chaotic, with flights delayed and baggage lost, making flying a stressful experience. These issues, however, are minor concerns for passengers with disabilities.

Flying as a wheelchair user

Flying as a wheelchair user comes with a myriad of challenges. Wheelchair users can, at a maximum, only stay in their chairs until they are at the gate, at which time we’re transferred to an "aisle chair”, and airline staff stow our personal chairs in the cargo hold. It’s a degrading experience being manhandled like a piece of luggage. You’re manoeuvred into an often too-small chair, not designed for your body or disability, and forced to trust a stranger with the control of your movement.

Few have documented the experience of flying with a disability as well as television personality and disability advocate Sophie Morgan. In her documentary Sophie Morgan’s Fight to Fly,  people with disabilities secretly record their in-flight experiences. This undercover approach exposes the public to the de-humanising realities that wheelchair users are all too familiar with: crawling to the bathroom because aircraft lack in-flight aisle chairs, forgoing food and undergoing dehydration because of inaccessible toilets, being stranded for hours waiting for disembarkation, and discovering on arrival that your wheelchair has been lost or damaged.

Rights on Flights

It’s the latter that spurred Morgan to establish Rights on Flights in 2023—a year when airlines broke her wheelchair three times. It’s also the issue that broader society tends to trivialise because of general misunderstandings about wheelchair use.

A wheelchair isn’t a luggage set, and it’s not just a fancy piece of cargo—it is an extension of the body, customised for its user. My wheelchair enables me to engage with the world. Without it, I’ve lost my freedom, my independence. It is my legs.

Separated from a mobility aid during a flight, wheelchair users like myself experience profound anxiety. If we arrive on the other side, something has gone wrong, then it’s game over. And not just for a holiday or work trip. It potentially disrupts life for weeks or months. Specialised wheelchairs can take considerable time to repair. It’s also expensive. Wheelchairs cost thousands of euros. If an individual can’t afford repairs or a replacement while attempting to secure reimbursement from the airline, then they might use the damaged one, which is dangerous.

Using a loaner wheelchair is also uncomfortable at best and hazardous at worst. Many people mistakenly believe wheelchairs are interchangeable, assuming that finding temporary replacements from hospitals and charity shops is easy. However, wheelchair users have different needs depending on their impairments. Our chairs fit our bodies in unique ways, and, if you sit in an ill-fitting chair for too long, you can develop sores. In 2021, disability activist Engracia Figeroa died from infections caused by sores she developed using a temporary wheelchair after United Airlines damaged hers.

This separation anxiety isn’t unfounded. In 2023, in the United States, airlines mishandled 11,527 wheelchairs and scooters, roughly 31 per day.

Accountability for damaged mobility devices

All of this makes the efforts of the lobby group Airlines for American and five major US airlines —American Airlines, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United—to overturn new rules for passengers with mobility impairments particularly disappointing. The consumer protection rules, finalised by the Department of Transportation (DOT) in December 2023, make the damaged or delayed return of mobility devices an automatic violation of the Air Carrier Act. 

Under these rules, airlines must promptly notify passengers of their rights, provide loaner wheelchairs, quickly repair or replace damaged devices, and reimburse passengers for any associated transportation costs. Airlines must also implement annual training for staff and contractors who handle wheelchairs or assist passengers with disabilities. 

The new rules took effect in the last days of the Biden administration. However, the Trump administration has delayed enforcing them, pending a final review to conclude this week. 

Airlines for America claims that new requirements are unnecessary and exceed the DOT’s authority, arguing that carriers have made meaningful progress for enhancing services for passengers with disabilities since 2022, particularly in wheelchair handling. 

Yet incidents suggest otherwise. As recently as October 2024, American Airlines paid a record $50 million fine after the DOT claimed it mishandled thousands of wheelchairs between 2019 and 2023. American Airlines did not admit wrongdoing, but one 2023 video showed a crew member launching a wheelchair down a ramp with such force that it summersaulted onto the tarmac before another crew member nonchalantly dragged it to the baggage cart. 

Despite industry claims of improvement, in 2023, 1.38 percent of mobility aids checked on US domestic flights were damaged, delayed, or lost. At first, that might not sound like much, but consider that a common domestic flight seat is between 150 and 200 passengers. Imagine boarding a flight knowing that—by random chance—two to three passengers would exit with broken legs. You’d probably be pretty nervous to fly. Is it any wonder that an estimated one in 10 people with disabilities avoids flying because they’re afraid for their mobility device? Such a scenario would also spark public outrage.

I believe the lack of public outrage over damaged mobility aids results from those societal misunderstandings about wheelchair use. That’s why we need education, research, and legislation. 

Education, legislation, and innovation

In advocating for the Assisted Air Travel Act in the UK, Sophie Morgan has explained that in her experience, most airlines need the government to step in with robust legislation and punitive measures to drive meaningful change. Similarly, in the US, airlines resisted reporting mishandled mobility devices until Senator Tammy Duckworth, herself a wheelchair user, successfully linked this reporting requirement to the Federal Aviation Agency’s annual budget in 2018. 

Beyond legislation, we also need innovation. Ideally, wheelchair users wouldn’t fear losing their chairs because they’d remain seated in them. 

Jack Kavanagh, non-executive director of Ireland’s National Disability Authority and its Centre for Excellence in Universal Design, has been urging aviation leaders to make this scenario a reality. His AeroFix Project has gained support from Declan Ryan, the founder of Irelandia Aviation, the company behind Ryanair and other carriers. Given Ireland’s global leadership in aviation, Kavanagh believes the country could take the lead on making planes more accessible.

AeroFix advocates for a “magic triangle” of solutions for wheelchair users: seats that enable passengers to stay in their chairs, technology that simplifies booking their flights, and aircraft designs that include accessible toilets.

AeroFix isn’t alone in working to address these challenges. Air4All, a collaboration between Flying Disabled and Delta Flight Products, is another promising development. Air4All has created an airplane seat that converts into a space for a wheelchair, securing the chair using the ISOFIX system common for attaching child seats in automobiles. The US Federal Aviation Administration is currently defining the safety criteria for supporting a wheelchair restraint system in aircraft cabins, and the Air4All team is optimistic about receiving approval this year. 

In the meantime, however, those of us with disabilities still need to fly, and when we do, we deserve the right to travel with dignity, respect, and the guaranteed safety of our mobility devices.