Every time I fly, I have to ask myself:
Will my wheelchair still work when we land?
Because airlines damage thousands of them every year.
As a wheelchair user, I’m handing over the piece of equipment that functions as my legs and hoping it comes back in one piece.
So I prepare in ways most people never have to think about. I travel with a laminated one-sheet explaining exactly how to handle my chair. I bring backups of everything. I carry a full binder for Canine Companions® Lovey, even though all of that has already been submitted ahead of time.
And even then, none of it guarantees anything.
This shows up clearly in what happened to Emily Ladau, whose $75,000 custom wheelchair was severely damaged after a Delta Air Lines flight, as reported by USA TODAY and Zach Wichter.
Stories like this feel shocking if you’re new to it. If you live in this reality, they don’t. They feel familiar.
People often point to the numbers and say about one percent of wheelchairs are mishandled, which sounds small until you actually translate what that means. Because if there were a one percent chance your legs would be broken when you got off a plane, you wouldn’t call that acceptable risk. You would question whether the system is safe at all.
Wheelchairs aren’t luggage. They aren’t interchangeable.
They are how we move through the world.
When they’re damaged, the question shifts from “how was your trip?” to “how are you going to function now?”
If you break someone’s wheelchair, you didn’t damage their property. You took away their ability to move.
The uncomfortable reality is that stories like Emily’s get traction because she has a platform. Most people don’t, which means this is happening every day to people who don’t have the visibility to force a response, and who are left dealing with the fallout on their own.
We’ve been talking about this for years. There has been real advocacy, real momentum, even policy movement. Yet the system still treats essential mobility equipment like cargo and fixes problems only after they happen.
If you knew there was a real chance your ability to move could be taken from you at the end of a flight, would you still see this as acceptable risk?