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AirIndia leaves disabled man’s wheelchair in Delhi

Pratyush Nalam came to New York City to study at Columbia University, but was stopped dead in his tracks when his motorized wheelchair didn’t arrive with him. It seems that AirIndia saw fit to leave it in Delhi without telling him. Apparently they decided that his fully-approved sealed gel-cell batteries weren’t approved after all, so they just left it at the airport. Nice work AirIndia!

Update: AirIndia agreed to send the wheelchair on a flight tomorrow, but without any batteries. Pratyush doesn’t yet know where he’ll source the correct batteries for his Taiwan-made wheelchair that isn’t available in the US. Stay tuned, this story promises to be a wild ride. Or not.

Service Dogs on a Plane

admin January 27, 2017February 16, 2017 #service dog

One man’s experience flying with his service dog Stella. Spoiler alert: the guy sitting next to him is a jerk, but ultimately does not take any of the remedies offered him.

Two wheelchair users kicked off Juneyao Airlines flight in China

admin March 18, 2016March 18, 2016 #China #Juneyao Airlines #lawsuit #wheelchair

Two Chinese disabled passengers have sued a mainland budget airline that stopped them boarding a flight because they were not accompanied by an able-bodied person and were “unable to take care of themselves”, mainland media reports.

The lawyer for the two wheelchair-bound passengers, who are paralysed from the waist down, told a lawsuit at a Shanghai court on Wednesday that the case against Juneyao Airlines was a fight not only for their right to travel, but also the right to travel of more than 85 million other disabled mainlanders, news website Thepaper.cn reported on Thursday.

Paraplegics have full use of their arms and hands, so we suspect that when the airline staff says they were “unable to take care of themselves”, that’s code for “can’t go to the tiny airplane bathroom by themselves and just might pee on our seats”. The reality is that many paraplegics use catheters, and the ones that don’t likely dehydrate themselves to avoid the issue. (Note that this practice is severely frowned upon by doctors and is extremely uncomfortable for the disabled person.)

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