Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #429

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Disabled Passenger Forced By Japanese Airline To Crawl Up stairs To Board Plane
An airline
in Japan has apolo- gized to a disabled passenger who was forced to crawl up a flight of stairs to board his plane.
Hideto Kijima, who uses a wheelchair, had to hoist himself from the runway at a tiny airport on the resort island of Amami up to the air- craft door, after staff at Vanilla Air refused to allow his friends to carry him aboard.
Kijima, who is paral- ysed from the waist down, has used 200 airports in 158 coun- tries but said this was the first time he had been refused help boarding a
flight.
The 44-year-old said he had been told before the flight to Osaka that it was not equipped with lifts to carry passen- gers with disabili- ties on to the plane. Vanilla Air is a budg- et airline affiliated with All Nippon Airways.
A member of staff said safety regula- tions prohibited his friends from carrying him up the stairs and initially attempt- ed to stop him pulling himself up the 17 steps to the plane door.
“I just had to ignore them and keep mov-
ing up, or I would not have been able to return to Osaka,” Kijima, who injured his spine while play- ing rugby at high school, wrote on his blog.
One of his friends pushed Kijima from behind until he reached the top of the staircase, where airline staff were waiting with a wheel- chair to take him to his seat.
“I’ve never thought I would be refused to fly for not being able to walk,” he said. “It’s a human rights violation.”
Vanilla Air apolo- gized to Kijima, who is head of the non-
profit Japan Accessible Tourism Centre, after he took his complaint to the transport ministry.
“We apologized to him for the unpleas- ant experience,” Vanilla spokesman Akihiro Ishikawa said. “We also explained that we are taking measures to improve our serv- ice.”
Vanilla said lifts were being installed at Amami airport, the only one on its 14 international and domestic routes that does not have a lift to enable wheelchair users to embark and disembark.
The airline said in a statement that it and other ANA affiliates “have taken immedi- ate action to rectify the inadequate wheelchair access at Amami airport and at all smaller region- al airports across our Japan domestic network, and have introduced manual chair lifts where facilities were found not sufficient to accommodate the needs of all our pas- sengers.
“These measures will ensure that pas- sengers in wheel- chairs are able to board our flights safely and comfort- ably. In addition to these measures, we
are reviewing our airport handling pro- cedures to make sure they are in line with our high cus- tomer service stan- dards.”
Vanilla Air had previ- ously barred pas- sengers who cannot walk unaided from boarding flights at Amami, citing the risk of accidents.
Other airlines in Japan, which will host the Paralympics in 2020, said they per- mitted staff to carry wheelchair-using passengers aboard when lifts were not available.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine