As I’m writing this article, I’m currently on a road trip from California to Texas so I can visit some family and friends that I have there. Why am I driving instead of flying? Great question! It’s a well-known fact in the disability community that airlines are notoriously awful at handling wheelchairs. In fact, a February 2020 study by the Department of Transportation (DOT) found that airlines break 28 wheelchairs per day on average. That’s thousands of people every year who are left without a crucial piece of equipment needed to live their everyday lives!

A lot of you reading this right now may not have been aware of that information, and that doesn’t surprise me. Like any other marginalized group, the disability community has had to fight tooth and nail in order for our voices to be heard. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) wasn’t signed into law until July 26, 1990, just 4 years before I was born. I can’t help but think of the countless people who came before me who suffered with far less accessibility and were treated like shit by society. And as much as the ADA has helped me and others like me, there are still so many issues that haven’t been fixed. I could go on and on about how incredibly difficult it is for disabled people to find jobs or how broken the Social Security system is or how much our treatment at the hands of able-bodied people is governed by prejudices and stereotypes and false assumptions or a number of other things, but that would take all day and I don’t have all the necessary energy or information to cover that right now. If you’d like to know more and want to help in some way, go to Google or YouTube. For now, I just want to talk about the shitty treatment of disabled people by airlines.

Luckily, there are people working to change the situation. An organization called All Wheels Up has been working on making tie-down straps for wheelchairs that can handle the acceleration and other stresses that come with flying on an airplane. Pete Buttigieg, the DOT Secretary, has also pledged to work towards requiring airlines to allow disabled passengers to stay in their wheelchairs when flying. This would be monumental for all the wheelchair-bound disabled people like myself who would love to travel internationally but are understandably afraid of losing an incredibly vital and ridiculously expensive piece of equipment.

So why wasn’t something like this done sooner? Money. It’s always about money. You see, most wheelchairs are pretty big and would likely take up more space than the average airline seat, so they would probably have to take out 2 seats and thus lose a potential paying passenger. And if they tried to make these disabled people pay more for their ticket than an able-bodied passenger to make up for the lost profit, there would obviously be a ton of outrage. So in the eyes of these big airlines, the solution is essentially to tell the disability community to fuck off and deal with it because we’re too much of a hassle. Right now if we want to fly somewhere, all of the burden is on us to protect our wheelchairs. There are loads of YouTube videos where wheelchair users give tips on how to minimize damage (taking apart the chair to put certain pieces in carry-on, wrapping the whole chair in bubble wrap, etc), but even with all that added precaution and stress it’s still a crapshoot! Whether or not we’re able to live our lives with some semblance of freedom SHOULD NOT BE LEFT TO CHANCE!!

Look, I enjoy road trips as much as the next guy. Stopping for snacks and milkshakes, jamming out to the radio, checking out the scenery and random tourist attractions. But I would absolutely love to be able to go to Japan or Europe or Jamaica or the Middle East or South America, or even just visit my family who live in other states without having to wake up at the crack of dawn to drive for hours on end. Until that day comes when we see real change, the fight for greater accessibility and more rights and freedoms continues!