What Flying Is Like for Passengers Who Use Wheelchairs

Charles Brown has always loved flying. He loves the steady roar of the engine beneath him as the plane rises high above a shrinking ground, turning houses into small blocks of color and cars into floating specks of light below.

Mr. Brown’s passion evolved from building model airplanes as a child to training in aviation ordnance when he joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1985. His military career was cut short a year later, when he hit his head diving into a swimming pool and injured his spinal cord, resulting in incomplete paralysis of his arms and legs.

He now uses a wheelchair and, because of his disability, finds flying to be a risk.

“When I fly nowadays, it literally is a moment of, ‘OK, what do I have to do to get through this day without getting injured more?’” Mr. Brown explained.

On his first flight after his injury, Mr. Brown got a concussion during the landing; he couldn’t stay upright, and his head slammed into the seat in front of him. On another flight a few years ago, two airline employees dropped him — it was a hard fall — while lifting him into a special aisle wheelchair. He shattered his tailbone and spent four months in the hospital afterward, battling a life-threatening infection.

There’s also the worry of what will happen to his $41,000 wheelchair when it is loaded and unloaded from the plane. The wheelchair, custom designed to fit Mr. Brown’s body, prevents pressure sores. Without it, he could risk another potentially life-threatening infection.

It’s not uncommon for airlines to lose or damage wheelchairs. In 2021, at least 7,239 wheelchairs or scooters were lost, damaged, delayed or stolen on the country’s largest airlines, according to the Air Travel Consumer Report. That’s about 20 per day.

Because of these risks, many people who use wheelchairs say flying can be a nightmare.

Even on a flight that goes smoothly, Mr. Brown endures multiple indignities from the moment he arrives at the airport to the moment he leaves, he said, largely because of a lack of accessibility for people with disabilities.

Much of this could be avoided, he and other advocates argue, if airplanes and airports were designed to accommodate passengers who use wheelchairs. And while the Department of Transportation recently published a bill of rights for passengers with disabilities, the initiative was a summary of existing laws and did not expand the legal obligations of the airlines.

To get a firsthand glimpse of the difficulties faced by passengers who use wheelchairs, The New York Times documented Mr. Brown’s experience on two recent American Airlines flights from Palm Beach to San Antonio, with a connection in Charlotte, N.C. Here’s a step-by-step visual diary of what we saw.

Check-in and security

Mr. Brown arrives and meets his travel companion outside the Palm Beach International airport at 7:25 a.m., three hours before his first flight of the day. (He usually arrives early, he said, because every step of the process takes longer for him.) As he makes his way inside, he stops to fist-bump the airport employees who bring his luggage to the check-in counter. Mr. Brown, the president of the Paralyzed Veterans of America, flies…