This isnt the full story Give all the facts. Air Canada doesnt provide the wheelchairs at airports. Airports have companies that do that. Also a wheelchair wont fit in an airplane they usually wait just outside the door
As a wheelchair user who has the misfortune of needing to fly quite often: my go-to method when this happens (which is about 30% of the time) is to refuse to leave. That way, a nice bunch of burly security officers come and lift me off, saving me the days of pain that dragging myself on the floor causes.
It’s awesome living in a society that doesn’t give a shit.
So far, once security arrive and see that the person refusing to leave the plane is physically unable to leave the plane, the bat starts to get swung towards the airline. I’ve been lucky I guess in that the human factor always kicks in to my favour.
Once I had law enforcement called (I can’t remember where I was exactly - as frequent fliers can empathise with - but it was somewhere in east Asia, maybe China) to remove me and I was freaking out about being stuck into a prison, and when the officers arrived they took one look at me and started SCREAMING at the flight crew. If I hadn’t been stressed to the hilt and freaking about about the deadline I was missing I probably would have found it hilarious.
(Also sorry if I sounded facetious before, where I’m from being legless is slang for being drunk so I was making a joke that I now realise no one else will have got)
Air Canada is garbage, and Toronto Pearson is as well. My spouse flew into Toronto last summer with a school trip and they had to wait 11+ hours because the airport had a power surge that apparently took out their capability to charge the plane or some nonsense they told them. Numerous kids having to sleep on the floor and then they got split up across other flights when things finally got fixed.
An airport, that doesn’t have power surge protection and other contingencies in place for such events, when their sole job is to keep planes and passengers moving. Maddening.
She said that eight cleaning crew members, two flight attendants, and the captain and co-captain watched as she tried to help her husband exit the plane.
At first I was going to say, “how as a human being do you stand there and watch this?” But i have to think that many of those people wanted to help but felt that they could not. Instead, I’ll ask: What kind of terrible, shithole, money grubbing, leach on society company must this be to have made all of those employees too scared to step forward?
Except the captain. That is your plane, you subhuman piece of shit. The company you work for may be the devil, but you let this happen while it was your responsibility to fix it. You watched it and did nothing.
Undoubtably, the airline doesn’t allow them to help because of “lawsuit”
And while I agree, they should have had the wheelchair there in the first place, I don’t see that as the core problem. While this incident wouldn’t have happened if the wheelchair were there, there will always be problems that need to be addressed in real time while running their business.
This incident shows how they respond to problems and it is terrifying. Sure, the company could make sure there are wheelchairs on every plane so that this particular incident never happens again. But the broader issue is that they appear to have actively disempowered their employees from solving problems or doing anything outside their specific list of duties. Problems will always happen and you can’t have a precise plan for every possible problem. That’s whey employees need the power to solve those problems. Otherwise you get evil shit happening like this.
Edit: and the solution was simple. If you don’t have the wheelchair you are required to have, you wait for a wheelchair (or give the passenger get the option to be physically assisted off). Yes, that is painful to the business. It means delays. But that is the obvious solution.
That’s actually a really good point about the staff and their freedom/confidence to solve problems on their own initiative. Hadn’t thought of that, but you’re spot on.
Also agree on delaying the plane, I meant to say that myself. Imagine rushing the guy off AND not helping him… unbelievable.
My wife is disabled and needs wheelchair assistance at airports. Stuff like this happens to her all the time. I was not shocked to see the poster above saying it happens 30% of the time to them. The problem is capitalism, bureaucracy and lack of accountability.
Wheelchair assistance is provided not by the airline, but by the airport, who hires some local company to do it.
These companies without exception are the lowest bidder, and their management is trying to scrape maximum profit by providing minimum service.
This means not enough staff, staff who don’t care because they are woefully underpaid, site supervisors who are incompetent and under trained and wheelchairs that are poorly maintained.
My wife often has to endure wheelchairs that are like that shopping cart I’m sure you’ve pushed that lists to the left / only three wheels touch the ground / makes a “clunk” sound every few steps… These pieces of junk can actually really hurt her and have contributed to at least one ER visit.
So she started speaking up for herself, complaining and asking for better wheelchairs. Well… The assistance staff (who never speak English as a first language and often just can’t even parse what she’s saying) have refused, ignored her, told her other chairs aren’t available when we’re literally looking at chairs just sitting there empty.
I have told the assistance staff to wait with her and our luggage, gone and gotten another chair myself and then switched her into it while they stand there looking like an annoyed goat, not lifting a finger.
This isn’t even counting the absurd number of times there is NO wheel chair assistance at the gate when we arrive, or there are four people who need it but only two chairs, or the gate agents call for a chair and it takes them 45 minutes to come. I have called airlines on her behalf when she’s traveling alone, because she’s stranded in some arrival gate with no assistance, after having to drag herself and her bags off the plane alone and the gate agents have left her there alone. We’ve had shockingly similar experiences in San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, Denver, Las Vegas and Albuquerque. It’s chronic, and a result of industry cutting corners and doing the bare minimum they can get away with.
Sort of, but good Samaritan laws generally would protect the person. They still could be fired for helping even if nothing goes wrong, because they’re not trained for that and immediately firing you might help a potential legal defense (and they don’t care at all about employees or morale because of the brutality of late stage capitalism). The company would be on the hook either way
A brave person would have helped anyways and took it online if they faced repercussions, a smart person would have whispered to the guy “I could lose my job if you tell anyone I told you this, but if you take a stand you’ll win. Obviously we need the plane, and it’s not like we can put you on the no fly list for this. I’m sorry, this isn’t right, but I need my job”
A person working for a healthy company would’ve apologized profusely for the wait and called around the airport until they found a chair… There’s a 0% chance this wasn’t an option, it would’ve made the airline look bad, but not publicly… Unless they’d already burned so many bridges they couldn’t ask the airport (or even other airlines, competition or no it’s not a hard sell if you’re cordial to the people you work around)
Add comment