Five major airlines—American Airlines, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United—have joined an airline trade association lawsuit to overturn a Department of Transportation rule that forces airlines to treat wheelchair users and their mobility devices with dignity. The rule, issued last year by then–Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, made mishandling wheelchairs an automatic violation of the federal Air Carrier Access Act. The lawsuit, filed this past week in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, asserts that the rule is “unlawful.”
Buttigieg worked on the rule with disability advocates including Samantha Jade Duràn when creating the rule. Duràn’s own wheelchair was damaged by an airline in 2017 when it was placed with luggage in the cargo hold.
“My brake was completely broken, to the point where I couldn’t brake at all,” Duràn told me. Duràn couldn’t afford to have the wheelchair repaired, so she used the damaged one for two and a half years—which, she points out, is very dangerous.
Airlines damage or lose thousands of wheelchairs every year. People can stay in their own wheelchairs until they are at the gate, after which they will use an aisle chair for the most part. The number of mobility devices damaged or lost was not even counted until 2018, when Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.), a wheelchair user herself, pushed for tracking of those damages and losses to be required in Congress’ annual reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Agency. As my colleague Russ Choma reported at the time, airlines had pushed lawmakers to resist the measure. “When the public gets information on how often assistive devices are broken, it will force them to actually handle wheelchairs better,” Duckworth said.
In addition to the new rule, the Department of Transportation also fined American Airlines $50 million last October for its mistreatment of disabled passengers, including damage to wheelchairs. At the time, Buttigieg said that the “era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over.”
But if the airline industry’s lawsuit succeeds, that era may return sooner than expected. This infuriated Duràn, who called the about-face “beyond aggravating” after seeing how difficult, and slow, the initial progress had been.
The rule that the airlines are targeting was only finalized in December—and Duràn believes it made all the difference in her treatment on a flight last week. “I was treated with dignity,” she said. “They treated me like a normal human being.”
It is unclear just how the current Department of Transportation will respond to the lawsuit. At a January event with the Century Foundation, Duckworth said that Sean Duffy, the then-incoming Transportation Secretary, had “pledged to support the legislation that was passed that would make air travel more accessible.”
Read the lawsuit below.
