Air Canada left a disabled passenger with no other choice but to drag himself down the aisle to get off the airliner after a flight from Vancouver to Las Vegas. The Canadian flag carrier stated that a third-party service was to blame for the degrading ordeal and offered a flight voucher.
Rodney Hodgins flew to Las Vegas in August with his wife Deanna to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Rodney has spastic cerebral palsy and uses a motorized wheelchair to get around. He can’t use his own wheelchair on the narrow aisle of a passenger jet. An airline employee is supposed to use a specialized-designed wheelchair to assist disabled passengers in boarding and deplaning.
In Las Vegas, there was no one there to assist Hodgins. Not wanting to hold up the plane’s crew after all the other passengers left, he painfully dragged himself along the floor to leave the aircraft and reach his wheelchair on the jetway. Deanna recounted the heartbreaking to the CBC:
Deanna called the experience “dehumanizing.”
“You are watching this man grab the back of a chair and then struggle and fight while I’m on the ground, crawling on the ground moving his legs, and we’re trying to get him to the front of the plane. I’m fighting his spasms trying to lift up his legs,” she said.
Once the couple reached the front of the plane, Rodney was able to access his motorized wheelchair. They said they were in shock, and asked to speak to the airport manager, who apologized profusely.
Hodgins booked the trip eight months in advance and modified his wheelchair to fit in the plane’s cargo hold, but the carrier didn’t put in the same effort. Air Canada offered the couple a $1,445 voucher for a future flight, but they want a formal apology and ensure that this never happened to another disabled person again. The airline is investigating why the third-party service had such a critical lapse.
Air Canada has been known for its horrible blunders in recent years. The carrier was accused of price gouging people attempting to flee a wildfire. One of the airline’s pilots threw a pair of passengers from a flight for refusing to sit in vomit-covered seats. The national airline can rarely seem to do anything correctly.