Air Canada has come under increasing fire in recent months, with the beleaguered airline now accused of disconnecting a disabled woman’s ventilator on a flight.
Bosses at the privately owned airline were hauled in front of the Canadian federal government to answer questions on a raft of reports of inadequate treatment of disabled passengers.
Alessia Di Virgilio, a disabled woman who uses a wheelchair to move and a ventilator to breathe, was filmed having her breathing device disconnected on an Air Canada trip in an undercover CBC report. A lift was also dropped on her head by attendants at the firm, whose CEO was paid $9 million USD in 2022.
Another wheelchair user, Rodney Hodgins, was forced to drag himself off an Air Canada flight over a mix-up. And Harish Pant, 83, died following a flight after suffering medical distress. His daughter claims Air Canada refused to divert, then flew on for nine hours to their planned destination.
After three separate recent incidents, including the case of Rodney Hodgins, Air Canada admitted it had violated Canadian disability laws. Canada’s minister of transport, Pablo Rodriguez, said the airline must do better.
He wrote on X that all Canadians must be treated with dignity and respect. Full stop.
And it isn’t just disabled flyers who are complaining with hundreds of passengers, including a film star, slamming Air Canada over its lousy service.
Air Canada told a newspaper outlet that it was taking drastic action to improve the experience of disabled flyers and highlighted multiple customer service awards it’s recently won.
Airline staff should be trained for such things as a person who has a ventilator, but also a disabled person should be accompanied by someone who is also qualified in its use.
The question is should wheelchair users be allowed on an aircraft because, in the event of a major evacuation, this could cause significant loss of life to passengers. However, disabled or not, they’re entitled to travel like everyone else because we’re not allowed to discriminate.
If a disabled person with a ventilator boards an aeroplane, it’s pretty self-explanatory that the ventilator should not be disconnected because they wouldn’t be able to breathe, but then I didn’t say the airline had any common sense, in fact, clearly, they didn’t have any common sense.
Air Canada should have refused to fly the passenger, once they have taken on the responsibility…. the responsibility is theirs.
If Air Canada didn’t want to deal with a passenger who had a ventilator and wheelchair, then they should have simply said NO and not taken on the responsibility, but they did and thus once they were on the aircraft they took responsibility, or not in this case.
They should have at least had some inkling as to know not to disconnect the ventilator. That being said, we humans appear to have a long history of being totally unprepared to deal with disabled individuals.
This does not, however, explain why the airline didn’t land early for the elderly man who evidently was having severe medical problems but remained on course for their destination.
If a person is not satisfied with an airline they’ve used frequently, then they should make arrangements to use another airline if they can. You know the saying, ‘Once bitten, twice shy’.
Honestly, you would think that these airlines were big enough to have nurses on hand to be assigned to disabled passengers. An airline nurse could be trained for special issues regarding the safety of moving passengers to and from the aircraft.
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