Air travel can be stressful for anyone, but passengers who use wheelchairs or have other mobility problems say that flying can be an absolute nightmare.
“A lost or damaged wheelchair can ruin a person’s trip,” said Shu Cole, professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Health and Wellness Design at the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington. “Some of these wheelchairs are custom made and are very difficult and very expensive to repair or replace.”
For more than a decade, Cole has been a leading researcher studying the travel experiences of people with disabilities and older adults who have trouble walking. Her research focuses on finding the problems experienced by travelers with spinal-cord injuries and mobility limitations.
Her deep knowledge in the field recently won her a $2.5 million grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research to find new ways to make the travel experience accessible and inclusive for people with mobility limitations.
Cole is the first researcher in her department to successfully win a grant from this federal research institute, said Richard Holden, chair of the Department of Health and Wellness Design and a co-investigator in Cole’s study.
The new grant covers a five-year study that Cole intends to use to develop a host of recommendations on training programs to improve the ways aviation employees assist passengers who use wheelchairs, walkers and other mobility aids.
“People with disabilities deal with psychological stress and even physical injuries when airline workers are poorly trained or poorly equipped,” Cole said. “We want to change that by developing standardized training protocols that can be more easily adopted by air travel services.”
Airlines lost or damaged more than 11,000 wheelchairs last year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. In February, the DOT announced a new proposed rule that requires airlines to immediately notify passengers when a wheelchair is lost or damaged. It also makes the airline responsible to repair the damage and provide loaner wheelchairs or face fines of up to $124,000.
The federal government has been getting tougher on airlines for mistreating passengers and damaging wheelchairs, but Cole said her research is not aimed at shaming the industry.
“Our primary goal is to collaborate with air travel service providers to help them enhance their services for passengers with disabilities,” Cole said. “We acknowledge the significant efforts aviation services have made over the years, and we recognize that solutions are not always simple.
“However, we hope for more progress at a faster pace.”
Simon Darcy, a professor in business management at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia, had hopes of becoming a professional athlete before he had a spinal-cord injury. As a quadriplegic who uses a C4 power wheelchair, he is a frequent traveler who regularly takes commercial flights for research, university visits and speaking engagements at conferences around the world.
Darcy is among the world’s leading experts in disability issues and specializes in helping organizations develop inclusive practices and cultures to accommodate marginalized groups. He is also one of Cole’s academic and lived experience research partners.
“Traveling is an experience we all look forward to,” Darcy said. “And when it goes wrong for people with disabilities, it goes really wrong.”
There’s not enough room in an airplane cabin for a wheelchair. Like most wheelchair users, Darcy needs assistance boarding.
He said it takes a manual handling team of two or three people or a special Australian-made hoist-like device called the Eagle Lifter to get him to his seat. When the workers are trained properly and the proper lifting equipment is available, he said the process is smooth.
With millions of people traveling by air, broken wheelchairs and injuries to passengers with mobility challenges are statistically rare. Still, many people like Darcy have lasting memories of nightmarish travel experiences.
On a recent flight from Australia to the U.S., Darcy said that as he was carried awkwardly onto the plane by poorly trained workers, his foot caught on an aisle chair. He couldn’t feel it, but he watched with dread as his left ankle turned sideways.
The next day, he said, his ankle was swollen and purple. X-rays later found that no bones were broken, but the ligaments were severely ruptured and have not yet healed, he said.
Darcy said this new IU-led research is not out to embarrass the airline industry. Rather, he said it aims to measure the problems and find ways to make travel safer, easier and more dignified.
“These are global problems,” Darcy said. “We want to find all the pain points and look for transformative solutions.”
Eric Lipp is the founder and executive director of Open Doors Organization, a Rosemont, Illinois-based nonprofit working to improve travel, tourism and transportation for people with disabilities.
Lipp, another research partner in Cole’s study, was 30 years old in 2000 when he underwent surgery to have a tumor removed from his spinal cord. He now uses a scooter and walks with a cane and leg orthotic.
“We are going to try to come up with a baseline training program to sort of set a standard for the industry,” Lipp said.
He hopes to show airline executives that improving the flight experience for disabled travelers is good for business.
A recent Open Doors Organization market study found that nearly 13 billion disabled adults took 25.4 million flights over the past two years, spending $10 billion on plane tickets and air-travel related expenses.
“We typically take at least one trip a year, and we spend about $400 on our ticket,” Lipp said. “That’s worth billions of dollars in revenue for aviation companies. So, if you can get us to fly one more time each year, we’re talking about doubling billions of dollars.”
Cole said she hopes to make it easy for air travel services to embrace her research and adopt more effective training programs.
“What we will do here is look at the general barriers: physical, psychological, social attitudinal,” Cole said. “The goal of this is to come up with some sort of report or recommendations for air travel services to use, because there is a need to standardize the training for their employees.”