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Fight for wheelchair rules to change on Aus domestic flights
Preparing to board a flight with her motorised wheelchair — just as she had months before — Australian Emma Weatherley was told it couldn’t be transported.
The 43-year-old has facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, or FSHD, a cruel and degenerative disease that results in a person’s muscles wasting away.
She was diagnosed at 28, and she has used a wheelchair for the past decade. The mother-of-two bought a motorised model featuring aircraft-approved specifications and a special flight mode.
However, on February 29, Virgin staff refused to allow it on board the Link Airways-operated flight, saying the 190kg chair exceeded the plane’s 120kg weight limit.
The FSHD Global Research Foundation managing director is a regular traveller. She said her mobility information was stored in the airline’s system and there was no weight limit advertised anywhere.
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However Virgin Australia told her in a letter allowing her wheelchair on the previous flight was a mistake by a staff member who didn’t check the aircraft type when checking her in.
Weatherley said the system discriminated against people with a disability, with there being no flights able to take her from Canberra to Sydney.
She instead has to be rerouted through another city such as Melbourne at her own cost.
There was no reason she couldn’t travel independently, but her confidence has been shattered, and she now feared being stranded at an airport if flights were delayed or cancelled or she was unexpectedly diverted again, she said.
Airline staff were also unaware of the procedures in place for those travelling with a wheelchair, leaving her to walk them through internal processes at the check-in desk, which made flying even harder.
“How do people who don’t travel a lot cope with that?” Weatherley said.
The disability advocate was responsible for extra flights, a night’s accommodation due to the lack of planes that could take the chair, and the time costs.
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“It’s really challenging,” she said.
“A lot of people with disabilities just can’t afford to travel by air.”
Weatherley was also calling for financial penalties for transport services that failed to provide adequate accessibility support, saying the cost of discrimination complaints was often factored into their business models.
She said: “The balance of power is really skewed because providers and operators have legal teams at their disposal.”
General accessibility was also a large problem in the community.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Weatherley spent hours on the floor of a bathroom at her former job after slipping on water. No toilet could accommodate her chair, and no one was around to help her.
The fall resulted in a dislocated hip and shoulder, requiring surgery.
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A lack of awareness about FSHD, including from her doctors and medical professionals, had resulted in people falling through the cracks, she said.
“There was no support groups for FSHD, no one had ever heard of it before, you’d go to visit doctors and they’d be Googling it in front of you because they didn’t know what the condition was.
“I lived in those gaps, I fell through the gaps myself, so I’m trying to block them up.”
Weatherley was calling on the Australian government to fund her organisation to support new treatments and trials.
More than 500 diagnosed patients would be trial-ready in the next four months, enough to sustain multiple clinical trials in Australia.
The foundation’s pre-budget submission called for $500,000 (NZ$544,000) over two years to also help fund an information support line and more face-to-face community meetings.
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