On December 16, 2024, the Biden administration’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced expanded air travel protections for disabled people. These protections include improved training of airline personnel and contractors assisting disabled people while they’re traveling, improved standards for enplaning, deplaning, and connecting assistance, easier access to information needed while traveling with assistive devices, and stricter protocol and fines airlines must pay when an assistive device is damaged during a trip.
“Every passenger deserves safe, dignified travel when they fly—and we’ve taken unprecedented actions to hold airlines accountable when they do not provide fair treatment to passengers with disabilities,” Buttigieg said in a press release. “With the new protections we’re announcing today, we’re establishing a new standard for air travel—with clear and thorough guidelines for airlines to ensure that passengers using wheelchairs can travel safely and with dignity.”
“It’s a win. It’s just joyful,” TV personality and accessible air travel advocate Sophie Morgan told Able News, of her immediate reaction to the sweeping air travel reform. Morgan is currently based in Los Angeles, but travels often for work and is a native of the U.K. “It’s just like a breath of fresh air when you [realize], ‘Oh, they’re listening. They’re acting for us.’ So often you feel like you’re screaming into the void and no one’s listening.”
Morgan, a wheelchair user, began advocating for air travel reform for disabled people worldwide in 2023 when an airline broke her wheelchair. Since then, she’s been at the forefront of the campaign to improve air travel conditions for people with disabilities. In that time, her wheelchair has been broken two more times, and other equipment she uses has been lost or broken by airlines.
But air travel rights for the community go beyond establishing stricter protocols and fines for airlines that break equipment. Morgan told Able News she was once told by airline personnel that she had to “starve and dehydrate on a flight” since there was no aisle wheelchair onboard and therefore no way for her to access a bathroom.
Morgan is just one of millions of disabled people who fly annually, but stories like hers are not rare in the community.
Xian Horn, who uses ski poles as a mobility aid, was traveling for the holidays in November 2023 when, as she told Able News, a member of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at JFK International Airport in New York initially refused to let her take her poles on a flight because they are traditionally categorized as sporting equipment, not an assistive device.
Horn said the woman screamed at her and refused to accept that the poles were a mobility device because she “made them this way.”
Per the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) website, an assistive device is defined as “any piece of equipment that assists a passenger with a disability in coping with the effects of his or her disability.” So, Horn wasn’t violating any rules or laws by taking her ski poles on the plane. She asked to speak to the woman’s supervisor and was told she was the highest supervisor available.
Horn said her heart was racing as she remembered the stranger acted “as though she understood my disability better than I did” and treated her “almost the same way you would treat a terrorist because [of] mobility devices.”
Eventually, someone let Horn on the plane with her poles. Horn told Able News that while she’s optimistic about the DOT’s new legislation, her experience has also taught her to be realistic.
“My second reaction is how is it going to be implemented and how soon?” she said. “Are we going to see the legislation [in] action?” She cited legislation calling to end segregation as an example of how written laws don’t instantly create change unless people take action.
Ultimately, Horn said, it’s up to airport and airline personnel to help change the disabled community’s air travel experience.
Morgan said for that reason, although she thinks the piece of the legislation mandating improved training is the “quickest win” of the DOT’s new protections, she wants those training sessions to be led by disabled people.
Michele Campanelli-Erwin, the president and founder of All Wheels Up, which advocates for improved accessibility in air travel, told Able News that one way the organization is hoping to support the newest pieces of legislation for accessibility in air travel is by meeting the community at Abilities Expos around the country and making sure people know the best practices for asserting their rights.
If, for example, a person with a disability is injured by the airline or their equipment is damaged, Campanelli-Erwin urged: “Make those complaints before you leave the airport because once you leave the airport, they’re no longer responsible to financially help you with your hospital expenses or fix your wheelchair.”
“If you feel hopeless, powerless…make sure you know your rights,” Morgan said to fellow disabled travelers, referencing DOT’s Airline Passengers with Disabilities Bill of Rights passed in 2022. “Always make sure this Bill of Rights is on your phone with you at all times so that if anything happens, you can stand your ground.”
She also called on the whole community to continue sharing unfortunate air travel stories on social media soon after they happen so that they can advocate for themselves, and the community can use real disabled experiences as fuel to push for even more air travel rights in the future.