In “What Kind Of World Are We Living In?” News, a disabled man was forced to crawl off of a United Airlines plane after none of the employees could locate the device to make the aisle handicap accessible. In a cruel twist of irony, the man in question, D’Arcee Neal who suffers from cerebral palsy, was on his return flight home from a conference discussing the issues that can arise when making locations handicap accessible.
Neal had already endured a five hour flight and he needed to use the restroom, but his disability made using the one inside the airplane extremely difficult. There is an apparatus that was created to make the airplane’s aisles more handicap accessible – called an aisle chair. The airline should have had one waiting for Neal when he arrived at his destination. However, there was a mix-up with the manager and staff and the aisle chair was not at the gate when the plane arrived. Neal waited an additional 15 minutes after he had already waited for all of the other passengers to disembark.
At this point, he grew frustrated and told the flight attendants that he could wait no longer. Given no other means or any other form of handicap accessible equipment, Neal was forced to get on his hands and knees and crawl from the plane. He not only had to crawl down the plane’s aisle but then up the walkway, where someone finally located a wheelchair for him. Instead of assisting him in any manner, all of the staff and attendants merely watched him as he had to crawl this entire humiliating distance. Instead of being irate and complaining to the company, Neal, who believed the company did not care about his well-being, merely went home after this demeaning incident.
Apparently, one flight attendant did have a compassionate bone in her body and contacted United Airlines headquarters about this egregious violation of their handicap accessible accommodations. United Airlines then contacted Neal to apologize and offered him a $300 flight credit. Neal happily accepted and stated that this was the first time a company had ever apologized to him for an incident like this. Sadly, Neal has endured other times where facilities were not handicap accessible and he was forced into similarly humiliating positions.
Hopefully for those who need handicap accessible transportation, the high-profile nature of this incident will make these companies more aware of how they can do better in the future.
Cover image credit via Wiki Commons available under a Creative Commons License. Original image modified to add the red “X.”
