40
American Airlines crew filmed my distress after wheelchair failed to arrive at Heathrow
(www.theguardian.com)
Enraging, but this will come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who has ever tried traveling while using a wheelchair.
The UK airlines seem to be better at hiding their numbers, but in the US in 2023 alone over 11,500 wheelchairs were lost or broken by airlines.
A wheelchair literally functions as legs, it has to be personalised, and can cost hundreds if not thousand or even tens of thousands of pounds.
Now imagine the kind of outcry there would be if the airlines broke or completely amputated the legs of over 11,500 passengers a year, or even just destroyed the personal property of that many people, to that value.
You can't, because that would never happen (and if it did, there would be international outrage and arrests, potentially even corrective legislation after the very first incident).
But wheelchair users? We just have to be grateful we were briefly tolerated out in public, and take it. Even when one of us speaks up, it barely gets covered by a single publication, and no action is taken by those in charge to improve things. Never mind the public just not caring because they don't like to think about possibly being impacted by something they see as only relevant to us "others".
Just another glaring example of how ableist and exclusionary our societies are.