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Notify the airline at least 48 hours before departure, arrive at the airport well in advance and wait until all passengers have left the cabin so that you can finally be taken care of… A plane trip for passengers with reduced mobility is all the more difficult as they cannot experience the journey installed in their own wheelchair. An American airline has just unveiled a new cabin concept that could change the lives of the travelers concerned, and make travel much easier for them.
The inclusion of travelers with reduced mobility is a real subject in the world of tourism. While Greece has decided to make 147 beaches accessible to people in wheelchairs by means of a device on rails transporting them into the water, the airline sector is also thinking about improving the comfort of passengers with mobility scaled down. Because it must be understood that the choice for a holidaymaker with reduced mobility to take the plane requires a lot of adaptation and anticipation. On the platform AllErgowhich provides information about equipment for equipping people with reduced mobility, the author of the Handilol blog, Rudy, says that one of the things he dreads the most when he takes the plane is “when ‘to be transferred to my seat, the manipulations by the assistance agents are often painful. In their defense, there is often little space between my seat and the one in front, which leaves little maneuvering to carry out the transfer “. The blogger which feeds its site to make the trip much more accessible to tourists with reduced mobility recounts the reality of a plane trip for a person in a wheelchair: “the crew on board has a small wheeled chair for going to the toilet. Unfortunately, these are so small that it is impossible to transfer inside“.
As a general rule, airports provide wheelchairs when travelers with reduced mobility wait for their flight in the boarding lounge, and they will have to make do with a smaller space than their usual seat in the cabin. The organization is all the more difficult as each airline has its own policy for handling equipment for people with reduced mobility. When they accept a wheelchair in the cabin, it must be folding, as on British Airways or Air France. Electrical equipment is checked in the hold, provided that its user has requested it at least 48 hours in advance, not to mention that the latter must check the type of battery with which the wheelchair operates, in order to ensure that the carrier will take good care of it. Sending a wheelchair to the hold is a real source of stress since this handling is unfortunately not always without consequences. In 2021, the specialized site simpleflying revealed that 29 wheelchairs suffer damage every day in the United States, or have been broken or even stolen, if not in the best of cases, returned to their owner late. 2% of wheelchairs are damaged when put in the hold of an airplane.
So many reasons that motivate to look carefully at the initiative of Delta Airlines. On the occasion of the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg, Germany, the American airline unveiled a cabin concept offering travelers in wheelchairs the possibility of not leaving their equipment when they settle in the plane. Simply remove the seat cushion and raise the lower part to get enough space to slide a wheelchair. The device must still pass the stages of testing and certification to become reality in Delta Airlines planes. According to the media CNN, which presents a very concrete video of the innovationthis presentation has already aroused great enthusiasm among travelers with reduced mobility.