My guy looks big and healthy but he can only walk about 100 feet before he has crippling leg pain. While we wait for the VA to approve a bypass for his leg, we went on a trip, planned, bought and paid for in 2019, that involved 6 flights, and the only way to do it these days was with wheelchair assistance. So we did.
In all of our wheelchair queue travels, we noticed a preponderance of Indians (the country) using wheelchairs. In some cases, as we waited in accessible lounges for our “drivers” fully half of the people were Indian. And we wondered why. Anyone else notice that and have thoughts? Tell me they’re not scamming our and other country’s accessible rules.
Did they all show you their passports?
You realize a full quarter of the world is from a South Asian country, right? And that’s not including the diasporas.
Or people from other countries that could look “Indian”, from Southern Europe to the South Pacific.
I take your point, but stand by my post.
I’m trying to figure out why anybody would want to “scam” an airport’s policies to obtain unnecessary wheelchair use anyway. Is using a wheelchair really so fun or luxurious that someone would pretend to need one if they don’t?
This 2018 article says that some unknown percentage of passengers request wheelchairs in order to get through airport security faster. But if you have to wait in a queue to get the wheelchair and then wait in a lounge for a staff member to push the wheelchair, what’s the point?
As for why it seemed to you that a disproportionate number of wheelchair users on your flights were of Indian (or maybe just South Asian in general) descent, there are a few possibilities:
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Maybe, a lot of people “look Indian” to you who aren’t actually Indian or South Asian, and you were mistakenly assuming Indian ancestry for a lot of the travellers you saw.
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Or maybe, for whatever reason, there happened to be a disproportionately high percentage of South Asians on the flights you took (do South Asians in the US perhaps have higher than average incomes? higher than average interstate and international business and social connections? all such factors would make South Asians more abundantly represented among airline passengers than among the general population). In which case, the percentage of South Asians among the wheelchair users would naturally be disproportionately high too.
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Or maybe, South Asian passengers happened to be doing more family-event-related travel (wedding season? whatever) in family groups with higher than average incidence of the elderly and disabled. In which case, they would be disproportionately likely to need wheelchair use.
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Or maybe, South Asian travellers are more likely to rely on wheelchair use as a form of general passenger assistance for, say, elderly relatives from overseas whose English isn’t very good or who are not very familiar with airports in general. This 2016 article [ETA: like the one you found in your second post] suggests that this is an observed phenomenon on Air India international flights.
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Or, some combination of any or all of the above.
I think your incipient indignation about “scamming” may be a bit of an overreaction, though. If elderly passengers are using wheelchair assistance as a form of generalized passenger assistance to avoid the tiring or confusing experience of getting through airports, as long as they’re not taking resources away from people in greater need, ISTM that’s a reasonable use of the system. I wouldn’t favor making passengers submit to a physical or a mobility evaluation before we say they’re allowed to use airline wheelchair service, for example. (Nor do I scrutinize too closely the apparent ages or sizes of the children in the families taking advantage of early boarding “for passengers traveling with small children”.)
That article makes it seem like they can get through security and customs faster, even including the extra time required to get the wheelchair.
“their senior citizen parents”
“not all disabilities are visible”
Exactly. I don’t class that as “misuse”
I’ll buy that, but like I said, it seems like a reasonable use of the system for many elderly passengers, especially ones who aren’t used to air travel.
From a selfish viewpoint, I would rather have tottery and/or bewildered elderly passengers whisked through a separate queue anyway, rather than have them slowing down the queue I’m in or experiencing distress due to the wait. As both the cited articles noted, plenty of elderly people are strong enough to walk a few hundred feet just fine, but less capable of standing in long lines with repeated starts and stops for extended periods.
That, plus getting them to where they need to be.
My father, in his eighties, partially blind (but too stubborn to use a white cane) and with slight dementia, flew from Toronto to Calgary. My sister was waiting for him at the Calgary airport. When he still hadn’t appeared an hour after his flight landed, she started asking questions as to whether he was actually on the flight. She was rebuffed for reasons of privacy. When he hadn’t appeared three hours after his flight landed, my sister got serious, and managed to convince airline and airport staff that they were dealing with an elderly gentleman with vision problems and dementia, who was probably lost in the airport somewhere.
Thankfully, they finally believed her, and Dad was located. Despite having gone through Calgary airport dozens of times in the past, he did not recognize it, and his vision problem prevented him from reading the signs leading to baggage claim and the exit. He spent those three hours wandering through the airside part of the airport, looking unsuccessfully for the exit, and getting more and more confused every step of the way. It would have been nice to have an airline/airport staffer to help him. Sis made sure that happened on his flight back to Toronto–and the airline was very helpful, making sure that Dad got the correct flight and that he was delivered into the hands of my aunt in Toronto.
If people such as my father can be looked after by a separate queue, wheelchair or not, but attended to by airline/airport staffers, that’s not such a bad thing. At least, it makes sure that they get where they’re going, and are met by the people they should be met by. If I have to suffer a long queue, and they don’t, I may not like it, but I understand why.
At least in the USA and Latin America where I work I don’t see apparently ethnic South Asian people using wheelchair services more than their representation in the general populace.
What I do know is there’s a standing joke in the airline business about our ability to perform miraculous healing.
On a typical flight I work carrying ~170 passengers we’ll usually have 4-8 people using wheelchairs getting on. Once in a while it’s just 1 or 2 and once in a while it’s 10 or more. But 4-8 is the fat part of the bell curve.
And so upon arrival there will be prearranged the same number of chairs & pushers waiting to take those same people off the plane and to wherever. And somehow on nearly every flight, after the last passenger has left there are still about half the chairs & pushers standing there obstructing the jet bridge after the passengers who needed a wheelchair to get on the plane simply walked past the now-unneeded wheelchair when getting off.
Perhaps oddly, miraculous healing occurs more at out-stations than it does at hubs, and more on domestic arrivals than international ones.
Some of it is totally legitimate, as navigating a large hub may be a longer walk than someone can make or standing in an interminable security or immigration queue may take longer than they can stand up without a break. Whereas walking to the curb in Podunk with no queuing is doable for them.
But it sure smells like a lot of it is an effort to get a free priority service. Miraculous healing is totally a thing. Happens on every flight.
When my wife was in chemo, the big airports were too much to manage without chair, but our home airport was okay. In addition, the time spent standing in lines outbound was more than she could do, but there were no lines from plane to airport exit.
Similarly, a few years ago, people were hiring wheelchair users as pretend family members to jump the lines at Disney World. Though I was in Disney World in 2008, with my brother, his wife and two kids and our 71-year-old mother with bad knees who used a rented power scooter throughout the trip. They would let the disabled person wait at the top of the queue for the rest of the family to make it through the regular line, or would allow the entire family to jump the queue. We would rather stay together, so frankly we were all able to skip some long lines. So I can see why someone would want to take advantage of the Disney policy.
BTW, she’s since had two knee replacements and can walk with much less pain now.
Either way, it would be a bit strange to see the wheelchairs primarily in use by one visible group.
I mean, I’d expect the wheelchair usage to more or less track the ethnic makeup of the people in the airport, not be concentrated among a smaller set that look a specific way.
The OP wasn’t trying to be racist, they were just pointing out something they didn’t understand and that was notable enough to ponder.
Did I say they were?
You did not.
It was likely a difficult OP to write without appearing racist, though. A friend I sometimes drink with will often ask loud questions along the lines of, “man, why do black people…?” I always cringe, despite the fact that he is black. (he grew up on a farm and knows very little about black culture).
Anecdotally, from my wife the flight attendant, there are far more wheelchair requests for her Delhi flight than her other international flights (all over Europe, Tel Aviv, Doha, and three or four cities in South America). She says there’s a much longer delay getting her Delhi flight deboarded because of the long line of wheelchairs.
It is faster because you bypass any and all lines, and there is no “extra time required” if you indicate you need a wheelchair when you purchase your ticket. The wheelchair is there when you do your curb-side check in.
Right- when someone gets pedantic and points out that they’re not necessarily [whatever], that they could be from [other places/groups that look similar], it’s almost always followed up by some sort of implication that they’re being racist by suggesting that they’re all [whatever], and that they’re all alike.
Or whatever. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if he said Indians or South Asians for the purposes of the thread; it’s a specific group who he noticed behaving in a certain way, and was curious about it.
I recently travelled on an international flight, with my sister in a wheelchair, and although boarding was slightly quicker, when we got to our destination there was a delay while we waited for a cart to take us to reclaim.
I wouldn’t recommend it as a ‘jugaad’ (life hack) but we had no choice.
As a person of South Asian origin living the US for over 25 years I can attest to the fact that this indeed true. But there is a context that bears some explanation.
There is a huge contingent of people of Indian origin who come to the US on a work visa (Indians account for 75% of this visa every year) to work mainly in the tech industry. Most of them are early career professionals who are coming to the US for the first time. It is a rite of passage to get their parents to visit them (and pay for it) many of whom are in frail health and probably traveling internationally for the first time. Hence the request for a wheelchair.
I have a 80 year old severely arthritic parents who would struggle to make connections if it wasn’t for wheelchair assistance.
ISTM that your airline employee culture is over-snarking a legitimate difference - the demands of boarding are very different than the demands of deplaning and exiting.