This Man Had To Crawl To His Flight

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

A new incident due to the intransigence of personnel in charge of an airline company has caused a Japanese airline to apologize to one of its passengers, who despite being disabled, did not receive the necessary help to board the flight and had to do so. creeping.

The embarrassing episode happened earlier this month, as reported by The New York Times, on a Vanilla Air flight - the low-cost airline owned by All Nippon Airlines - when Hideto Kijima, 44, was returning from his vacation with a group of friends from the island of Amani-Oshima heading to Osaka, where he resides. At the time of boarding, the staff in charge told him that he could not do it, since they did not have the appropriate ramps for his wheelchair to move.

Friends of Kijima, who was paralyzed from the waist to his lower extremities while playing rugby in his teens, offered to carry him onto the plane, but employees declined because they said this violated safety regulations. The crew also could not carry it. Then, the affected one when seeing that he was going to be left alone stranded on that island, began to crawl, driven only by his arms, to the artifact.

The protagonist of this incident, which happened on June 3, but until this week received international media attention, is an activist for the rights of the disabled and has his own blog. There he wrote the hard experience that happened: “I sat on the stairs and began to climb one by one. The staff told me to stop, but I ignored them. How was I supposed to go back to Osaka?”

In addition to the apology, the company says it has already installed an elevator at that airport to facilitate wheelchair access for the disabled.