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Air Transport Association Symposium November 17, 1999 Good afternoon, I first want to thank Carol Hallett and ATA for inviting me to participate in this historic meeting, and to acknowledge all of you for recognizing the critical importance of making inclusive air transportation service a reality for your customers with disabilities. I also want to thank the Air Transport Association for the opportunity to address you from a disability community perspective on "Meeting the Needs of Passengers with Disabilities". The presence of disability advocates as presenters at this symposium attests to the desire of people with disabilities to work with you in making the air transportation industry an inclusive and equitable, as well as customer-friendly, enterprise. We join you here as partners in finding solutions to the many problems that continue to make air travel unusually unpredictable, stressful, demeaning and at times hazardous for people with disabilities. In 1996, the National Council on Disability convened a national summit of 300 grassroots disability leaders to help develop a national disability policy agenda promoting the goal of independence. A key theme in their deliberations was the need for more vigorous enforcement of existing disability civil rights laws. Among their final recommendations was a directive to the National Council on Disability to work with [the responsible] federal agencies to develop strategies for greater enforcement of existing disability civil rights laws "consistent with the philosophy of the ...ADA." NCD responded by embarking on a series of studies of federal enforcement of the Air Carrier Access Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The first report on ACAA enforcement was released this past March. The IDEA Report will follow in January and the ADA Report in March 2000. The findings of our Air Carrier Report were disturbing. NCD found that DOT's efforts to ensure airline compliance with ACAA were inconsistent and largely ineffective. For example, although airlines were required to provide evidence of their response to complainants who filed informal complaints with DOT, DOT usually did not investigate the complaints. As a result, DOT seldom made determinations as to whether the complainant's civil rights had been violated, and rarely followed-up to ensure complainant satisfaction with the airline's corrective action. NCD found that the sanctions for violating the civil rights of passengers with disabilities, even on a systemic basis, were trivial and ineffective between 1987 and 1998. When airlines were found liable for ACAA violations or when consent orders resulting from DOT investigations were issued, the civil penalties imposed were light (five civil penalties imposed ranging from $15,000 - $40,000 for multiple consumer regulation violations, only one of which was an ACAA civil rights violation). Sometimes the penalties were virtually insignificant ($3,000 for a pattern and practice violation). Air carriers that were assessed larger penalties sometimes were permitted to apply the money toward the purchase of accessibility equipment or to pay for other remedial measures. NCD found that DOT was not aggressive in assessing and ensuring that airlines were consistently meeting the requirements of the regulation. DOT rarely exercised its authority to determine the actual numbers of complaints received by airlines by passengers with disabilities alleging violations. Passengers with disabilities sent the vast majority of their complaints directly to the airlines without sending copies to DOT. DOT did not require the airlines even to summarize and conduct trend analysis on their own complaint data regularly or to correct recurrent problems based on these analyses. DOT did not ask to review any summary complaint information unless in connection with a specific investigation. NCD found that, given the minimal resources allocated to compliance monitoring and enforcement, a credible DOT ACAA enforcement mechanism did not exist. At the time research for the report was conducted, the Consumer Protection Division had the equivalent of less than one full-time employee assigned to ACAA complaint handling/compliance monitoring activities. People with disabilities continue to encounter frequent, significant violations of their civil rights. As I am sure you have discussed in panels over the past day and a half, the negative experiences of disabled travelers go beyond the typical hassles all air travelers encounter. The experience of discrimination on the basis of disability erodes basic human dignity, and denies the right of persons with disabilities to be given equal consideration in a way that is responsive to their needs for accommodation. When you are dropped or mishandled by poorly trained staff who treat you like an inconvenient piece of luggage, when you can't get critical information because it is not provided in an accessible format, you are left with the feeling that you don't count, that your dignity as human being has been violated. Perhaps the best way to describe what it is like for people with disabilities who travel by air is that they never know what to expect from one flight to the next, even on the same airline. Will there be an aisle chair onboard? Will someone help me in time to make my connection? Will they seat me where my dog can fit under the seat? The standards of service are so lacking in consistency, that persons with disabilities must always be prepared to continually assert themselves to get the service that includes the accommodations they need. From my own personal experience, I have an unfortunate wealth of horror stories on which to draw to underscore the range and frequency of violations myself and others encounter when we fly. I am reminded of the time when I was seven months pregnant and forced to sit in an aisle chair at the door of the airplane in the winter while every passenger aboard shuttled past me because they couldn't find anyone to lift me onto the plane. Or the time when I asked the flight attendant to check on my wheelchair and learned from the pilot that it had been accidentally given to another passenger. Or the time when I was left on the plane for 45 minutes with the lights out because the staff had forgotten that I was still on the plane. When these kinds of things occur, you feel angry, humiliated, sometimes afraid, not in control, violated. The emotional damage is not easily forgotten or repaired. For some people with disabilities, flying is so unbearable that any alternative means of transportation will be used. People with mobility impairments also tell stories of being dropped or mishandled to the point of injury by personnel who apparently have not been trained in lifting techniques. They are frustrated by the fact that even if an airline has a policy to provide aisle chairs onboard, sometimes there are none on their flights. More than one person in these circumstances has crawled up the aisle to the restroom rather than soil themselves on board. Many people have had wheelchairs returned to them damaged, sometimes beyond repair, only to be told that the airline was not obliged to pay more than $US 2,500 - in some cases, only a fraction of the replacement cost. When people whose disability requires bulkhead seating call ahead to reserve it, they may be told the availability of those seats cannot be determined until the day of departure. What is worse, no matter how diligent they are in calling ahead to request special accommodations, they can't rely on there being any record of their request when they arrive at the airport. And of course, if they have multiple connections, the personnel on the connecting flights often are not at all aware of their requests. When they fly on small aircraft, people with mobility impairments must sometimes endure the indignity of being physically carried onto the plane either in someone's arms or in a wheelchair, because there are no mechanical lifts available. They may be left for long periods of time waiting for assistance to deplane or to get their wheelchairs so they can make their connecting flights. Sometimes they are forced to wait so long they miss their connections. People who are blind or have low vision very often have difficulty obtaining any of the information made available to the public because there are no copies in Braille or audio format. Sometimes they are hassled by flight attendants who are reluctant to let their service animals onboard, or who do not know to seat them where there is room for the service animal. People who are deaf or hard of hearing may miss their planes when last minute changes in flight numbers or gates are announced over the public address system. It also happens that a deaf person has no means to communicate with the outside world directly at an airport, because there is no TTY, or if there is, it is not working. People with cognitive impairments may not understand what they are being told by service personnel, who do not seem to understand the need to speak to them slowly, clearly and simply. Adults who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, sometimes may be treated condescendingly by service personnel who address their younger or more able-bodied companions as though they were not present. Please do not imagine that these problems rarely occur. Somewhere in this country these problems still occur everyday. Despite a nine year-old regulation prohibiting discrimination and spelling out the basic requirements for serving air travelers with disabilities, many U.S. commercial airlines still do not follow through consistently. For people with disabilities, reasonable accommodations for their disabilities in providing services are not perks, they are not luxuries, or special privileges. They are necessary to achieve a minimally acceptable standard of service that any customer, disabled or non-disabled, would expect. Looking at the situation from an industry perspective, what must be done to fix these problems? Achieving fully accessible air transportation services will require that airlines establish working partnerships that produce results with air travelers with disabilities, with DOT, with aircraft manufacturers, with experts in facility and universal design, and with their industry counterparts (i.e., competitors). The results air travelers with disabilities expect are that services they are purchasing meet their needs for accommodation. All customers expect service that meets their needs. Service that does not meet this minimal expectation is not good service. As long as service delivery to people with disabilities is looked upon as an extra (i.e., a distraction from the business of serving your "real" customers), it will be substandard. So the challenge is to ensure that appropriate accommodations for people with disabilities are incorporated into your standard service operations, so that people with disabilities have equal access to the services they buy. Equal access is achievable using the principles of good business management and customer service. All the standard precepts apply: first - know your customer. Consult with disability advocacy groups in your communities. Ask them what accommodations they need to travel by air comfortably. Don't rely solely on the advice of design experts. Establish direct communication with your current customers with disabilities by asking for their feedback. Implement their suggestions in your service programs and facility improvement projects. Second, consult with the Department of Transportation and work with them to identify and implement the specific accommodations necessary to ensure a minimally adequate standard of service. Third, plan for inclusion. When building new or remodeling older aircraft and facilities, incorporate universal access design concepts that accommodate customers with special needs, including people with disabilities. Plan for the needs of able-bodied and customers with disabilities at the same time, so that resources can be fairly allocated to meet the needs of all. Fourth, recognize that in the next millennium, people with disabilities will make up an ever-increasing share of your customer base. It's not only a matter of making services accessible to a specialized niche market. As the population ages and lives longer, more people without disabilities who travel frequently will acquire functional limitations and need more accommodations. It is a matter of maintaining quality service for your already existing customer base with changing needs. For this reason, inclusive air transportation service is practical and makes good business sense. Fifth, identify and eliminate stereotypes and prejudice in serving people with disabilities. Stereotypes are barriers to good communication and good service. Train yourselves and your personnel to see the person first, not the disability. The efforts you make to implement inclusive air transportation service will yield many short and long-term benefits. The benefits will extend beyond the customer satisfaction of persons with disabilities and the repeat business to the airlines and airports serving them to the economies of the cities and regions where air transportation services are provided. Inclusive air transportation service not only attracts more customers. It creates new economic opportunities by generating service jobs and by giving people with disabilities greater mobility in their professional and personal lives. The costs of an inclusive system can and will be mitigated through a variety of measures, until they are offset altogether by the benefit of a larger customer base. As people with disabilities continue to take their rightful place as full participants in society, their needs for air travel will increase. Viewed from this perspective, the benefits of an inclusive air transportation system are not only desirable, they are necessary to furthering growth, development and prosperity. The challenge of creating inclusive air transportation services is an enormously important one. Successfully meeting that challenge will have a transforming effect on individual lives and communities by removing barriers to job mobility, travel for pleasure and social exchange for people with disabilities and by creating an air transportation infrastructure that is flexible and responsive to the changing needs of all your customers. HOME | FAQs | NEWSROOM | SITE MAP | FEDERAL AGENCIES | RESOURCES |
