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MELBOURNE — Australian budget airline Jetstar apologised on Nov. 24 after making a Paralympic champion check in his wheelchair before catching a flight, prompting him to drag himself through the airport.
Kurt Fearnley (pictured), who had just completed a gruelling 96 kilometre (60 mile) crawl using his hands along a Papua New Guinea jungle track, had complained bitterly about the weekend incident.
The equivalent for an able-bodied person "would be having your legs tied together, your pants pulled down and be carried or pushed through an airport", he said.
Fearnley, 28, hauled himself around Brisbane airport using his hands, including through a bathroom, and on to his flight in protest when Jetstar asked him to check in his personal wheelchair.
He spurned the airline's offer of its own wheelchair specially designed for planes, complaining that he would lose his mobility and have to be pushed around by airport staff.
Jetstar, the budget offshoot of national carrier Qantas, issued a statement apologising to the two-time Paralympic champion, saying any embarrassment and hurt was not intentional.
It said its policy was for passengers in wheelchairs to be transferred to the airline wheelchair, which is easier to manoeuvre inside the plane, at the boarding gate.
Fearnley, who won the marathon gold in the Beijing and Athens Paralympics, said the airline had told him it was working on an alternative boarding procedure for disabled passengers.
"As long as that's going ahead, I'm more than happy," he told Australian Associated Press.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From AFP:
