There’s a debate I have been following in the media recently which has made me really think not just about the practicality of our business but also how it is perceived by other passengers for the first time. It started off with an inflammatory story in the Wall Street Journal which made anecdotal references to the phenomenon which has become popularly known as ‘Jetway Jesus’. This is where a person taken to an aircraft in a wheelchair suddenly gets to their feet and walks to their seat. This seems to infuriate the journalist and is dismissed as at best ‘queue jumping’ and at worst ‘playing the system for passengers requiring special assistance’. It wasn’t a very nice article, but I assume it was clickbait for a certain portion of the WSJ’s readership.
However, journalist John Walton of TheUpFront produced a robust response to the article. The WSJ article quoted an irate passenger who counted 25 passengers using wheelchairs on a flight to Guadalajara. But as Walton points out in his article, “That is almost exactly the percentage of US adults — 12.2 percent — who, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) said in July 2024, “have a mobility disability with serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs”.
He also made the point that airports and airlines are perhaps expecting too much from their passengers in terms of the amount of ground they are asked to cover to travel through an airport. This made me think as I regularly monitor my steps, and I know that when I fly, and particularly if I need to get a connecting flight, then I regularly pass 10,000 steps. For me that’s about 5km in distance.
The original article highlighted flights from the Indian sub-continent as having a high percentage of passengers needing special assistance without taking into consideration a) the age of the passengers it was highlighting or b) the number of those requiring connecting flights across large airports. No airline or airport wants to discourage older passengers from flying, but there shouldn’t be a negative association with them requiring special assistance in doing so – even if they are not regular wheelchair users.
Having read the articles, I wondered what the ramifications were for onboard wheelchairs and their users. While not liking the general tone of the WSJ article, experience has taught me to empathise with the way people feel and behave in an airport and on board an aircraft. It’s an unusual environment, we are not in control, much of how the experience is organised does not follow normal rules (from an outsider’s perspective) and generally it’s all a bit stressful. That in turn leads to extreme reactions and to perfectly rational (in other circumstances) people behaving out of character.
I’d hate to think that this ‘Jetway Jesus’ anger would spill over to onboard wheelchair users as I am sure that many of the increased number of passengers requiring special assistance will also need help accessing the toilet or moving around the cabin generally. Therefore, as we have always maintained, every passenger aircraft should have an aisle chair (onboard wheelchair) aboard. The argument is, given the above, should they have more than one aisle chair as potentially the increased numbers lead to increased demand and, if passengers are becoming more vocal about what they perceive as ‘special treatment’, airlines may need to consider how they can respond more quickly and flexibly when passengers need to use an aisle chair during a flight, ensuring the needs of all passengers are met.
By Sarah McOnie