Quote:
Originally Posted by Butch Cassidy Slept Here
We'll assume that, somehow, you manage to get your personal wheelchair through TSA, and you're going to try to gate check it, in the jetway, at the aircraft door, or something like that. Now, you're at your destination airport, still on a mainline flight. Your plans, again, for retrieving your wheelchair? What, you snap your fingers and the airline staff drop everything, spring into action, retrieve your wheel chair from the baggage hold, then bring it up to the gate for you.
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Well, that's pretty much what would happen, sans finger snapping. If the chair is checked at the gate, it is brought back to the gate. The only exception would be if it were checked to the final destination. In that case, the chair would be taken to the connection flight, and the passenger transported by an airport wheelchair to the connection. But that's only if the passenger asks to do it that way. And some do. If they have an electric wheel chair or if it's a scooter, the batteries MUST be disconnected. And the fewer agents that have to disconnect and reconnect it, the better for the chair. Besides, it takes time, and the passengers know this, so rather than eat connection time and risk missing a flight, they have it checked through.
So, what we have here, is someone that has stated how things work, and then someone who has no clue saying the first person is wrong.
On to Judge's question, which I can answer, although butterfinger can chime in as well.
The airline is only required to have an in cabin stowage space if the aircraft has 100 seats or more. It does not have to be an actual closet. Also, the ACAA states that the wheelchair has to fit within the dimensions of the stowage area. So, if you have a huge electric wheelchair, it still may not go in the cabin, even though you ask, and that's legal under the law. The DOT does understand that planes have limited space.
JetBlue ran into a catch 22 a couple years ago, and actually, I'm not certain what solution they came up with. But what happened was, they started flying 100 seat regional jets, the Embrear 190. There is no closet on that aircraft, and no room for one. So they tried to get an exemption from the DOT, but the DOT said no. So the only solution they could come up with at the time was to remove 2 seats from the plane to put in a closet, but that would make the plane exempt, and hence no need for the closet.
AirTran had a similar situation with the 717. There is no closet on board, and no room for one. However, the first row of coach has a bit more legroom, so they came up with some sort of floor strap system. Along the floor of a plane is a set of tracks running from front to back, that the seats all attach to. What they do is if they have a wheelchair to be stowed on board, they don't seat any passengers in that row of coach on the 2 seat side, and instead put the wheelchair there, and strap it to the floor tracks. I'm thinking JetBlue must have come up with some similar solution because the E190's hold 100 passengers.