Impact on Airlines of the DGCA CAR Section - 3, Series - M, Part – 1

Civil Aviation Requirements on Carriage of disabled passengers - Its rightful Impact on the airlines

NON DISCRIMINATION

Airlines can NOT

·       Refuse to carry unescorted disabled passengers or their mobility aids and devices, even if they do not hold any disability certificate.

·       Require Medical clearance or special indemnity forms from persons with disabilities.

·       Require a disabled passenger to provide additional information once the ticket has been confirmed. In case of online booking, all requisite information regarding specific needs of the passengers must be collected during the online booking process.

·       Limit the numbers or types of disabled passengers on their flights.

·       Refuse to engage in Interline transactions for carriage of disabled passengers, or to commence/continue interline transportation of such passengers.

PROVISION OF ASSISTANCE

Airlines MUST

·       Provide necessary assistance to persons with disabilities who wish to travel alone without an escort.

·       Provide seamless assistance from the departing airport terminal to the destination airport terminal.

·       Provide individual briefing on emergency procedures, cabin layout and the available specialised equipment to disabled passengers and their escorts.

·       Provide appropriate in-flight support including assisting passengers with impaired mobility to get to the onboard toilet.

ENSURING APPROPRIATE STAFF TRAINING

Airlines MUST ENSURE that

·       Staff assigned to handling disabled passengers, example Cabin Crew/Commercial Staff including Floor Walkers and Counter Staff etc., MUST be trained in:

o   Disability Awareness,

o   Assisting persons with reduced mobility (on-ground and during embarkation), and

o   Assisting Unaccompanied Passengers with Disabilities (In-flight).

·       Appropriate Training is provided to the loader staff to ensure proper storage and handling of mobility equipment.

·       Staff Training for assisting emergency evacuation of disabled passengers.

PROVISION OF REQUISITE EQUIPMENT

Airlines MUST ENSURE

·       Availability of wheelchairs at all stations without any extra charge.

·       Availability of boarding/alighting devices (such as ambulifts, aisle chairs etc.) and low floored accessible buses without any extra charge to the passengers.

·       Provision of narrow onboard wheelchairs to enable passengers with reduced mobility to access lavatory facilities.

·       In-flight availability of information in accessible formats such as Braille, Large Print etc.

ADAPTING POLICIES, PROCEDURES AND PRACTICES

Airlines MUST

·       Formulate and publish detailed procedures for:

o   Carriage of disabled persons,

o   Emergency evacuation of disabled passengers, and

o   Carriage of Service Dogs in Cabin.

o   Medical Clearances.

·      Ensure that when overnight accommodation is offered, e.g. during forced overnight halt, or when offloaded, Wheelchair users SHOULD be allocated accessible accommodation.

Complied by Shivani Gupta, Director AccessAbility

Inaccessible Pedestrian Environment in Delhi

Inaccessible Pedestrian Environment in Delhi

Shivani Gupta
Director, AccessAbility
shivani@accessability.co.in

In the flurry of preparing Delhi for the upcoming Commonwealth Games, Delhi has been revamped. There is the new BRT Corridor, the low floor buses, huge overhead bridges, accessible pathways and the swanky metro. All of these have accessibility incorporated in them. I should feel fortunate being a wheelchair user that now public transport and the pedestrian environments is accessible to me. But the unfortunate reality is that none of these so called accessible facilities are really accessible to the disabled and hence have not brought the desired mobility. Money is being spent in the name of accessibility but what we have really got are ‘teasers’. ‘Teasers’ being my way of describing facilities that are signposted as being accessible but are not usable by disabled people in reality.

Usability is the first and the basic requirement of accessibility and it is here that all these fail. Usability goes beyond blindly putting on ground accessibility standards, it is about how a user will actually interface with the given service/facility/infrastructure etc. it may also vary based on the social context, therefore what may be a working design in a developed country may not be so in a developing country. To increase usability is also the crux of Universal Design.

Just yesterday I went out on my wheelchair and thought of crossing to the other side from the overhead foot bridges that have been built all over Delhi. The bridge is about seven meters high with a ramp 89 meters long of 1:12 gradient to get onto the bridge and the same ramp on the opposite side.

In India most people will say “arre there is a ramp na to get on and off the bridge and that to of 1:12 gradient, then what more do you want?” What they fail to see is that a wheelchair user will need to wheel two hundred meters, that too up and down a ramp to cross just a 10 meter wide road. So its 10 meters verses 200 meters.

Major Design Flaws:

• To provide a ramp to negotiate a level difference of more than 3 meters is impractical and not usable by the disabled and here it is more than double that height.
• A ramp to negotiate a level difference of more than 3 meters must have a gradient no more than 1:18 here the gradient is 1:12
• Landings must be provided after every five meters, here landing is provided after 40 meters.


I am sure even athletes using wheelchairs will find negotiating this ramp difficult!

Here I will also like to point out that accessible parking is demanded & provided closest to the entrance to ensure that disabled car drivers and passengers do not need to walk extra, but when it comes to pedestrian environments adding 200 meters to the journey is reasonable. Why this disparity?

A resent press release by the Delhi metro said that there ‘Delhi Metro provides wheel chair facility to old and physically challenged commuters at all Metro stations. On an average, 149 physically challenged people and 78 blind commuters use the Metro system daily’ and ‘On an average, it is carrying about 800,000 commuters everyday.’ Just taking the figures published by them it is easy to calculate that there are only 0.02% people with disabilities who use this so called ‘accessible transport system’ to travel.

The pavements in Delhi are been refurbished and most with tactile guidance and ramps at the beginning and end. The amazing part is that the guidance breaks whenever there is an obstacle in the path like trees, poles etc., hence ensuring people with blindness bang into them and majority of the ramps are blocked by bollards, through which a wheelchair cannot pass.

I wonder when will people with disabilities stop compromising and accepting shoddy solutions to improve access. The UNCRPD talks about ‘Persons with disabilities to have access, on an equal basis with others’ its time we demanded it.

To the Airline Giants in India

The Director General Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued a landmark policy on the ‘Carriage of Persons with Disabilities’ in May this year. This is a landmark initiative not only because neither the Railways nor the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways have any such recognition of travelers with Disabilities but also because this Civil Aviation Requirement (CAR) was, for the first time in any government regulations’ history, compiled following inputs from Disabled Peoples Organizations (DPO’s) and extensive public consultation. Though it’s not entirely pro disabled flyers, yet this considerably progressive policy is perceived as a step forward by the Indian government to affirm its commitment to truly embracing the diversity amongst travelers.

The famous Rajiv Rajan case of June 2007, that was filed in the Chennai High Court following Air Sahara refusing boarding to Rajiv on the pretext that he was unescorted and did not carry a ’Fit to Fly Certificate’ was discharged from the court on the pretext that the new CAR (Section 3 – Air Transport, Series ‘M’ Part I Sub: - Carriage by Air of Persons with Disability and/ or Persons with Reduced Mobility) has been issued to ensure that any such cases in the future can be rightly addressed. It has been over six months since this CAR was implemented, but if one evaluates the ground reality nothing much has changed and disabled travelers continue to live on the mercy of generally non-compliant airlines and their ill informed customer interaction staff.

 What does the CAR say?

 AIRLINE Responsibilities (to list a few)

 1.      Cannot refuse to carry unescorted persons with disabilities, even if they do not have a disability certificate.

2.      People with disabilities are not required to produce any medical certificate nor sign any indemnity forms before flying.

3.      Airlines must provide all necessary assistance to a passenger with disabilities who may want to travel alone.

4.      Airline staff assigned to handling disabled passengers e.g cabin crew/commercial staff MUST be trained in:

a.       Disability Awareness

b.      Assisting persons with reduced mobility (during embarkation)

c.       Assisting unaccompanied passengers with disabilities (in-flight)

5.      The airlines must provide for boarding devices such as ambulifts and aisle chairs. The use of the ambulift is free for passengers with a disability certificate.

6.      In-flight availability of information in alternate formats such as Braille, Large print etc

7.      All airlines need to formulate and publish (including on their website) detailed procedures for the carriage of disabled passengers.

 Ground Reality

 Today when it is possible to fly from Delhi to Mumbai in about Rs 4,000/-, people with reduced mobility especially those who are unable to climb the steps leading to the aircraft need to pay about Rs 1,685/- at each airport for the use of an ambulift. This almost doubles the fare for a person with reduced mobility vis-à-vis a non disabled person. Although the DGCA regulation entrusts the responsibility and bills for the required equipment onto the airline, unfortunately this doesn’t necessarily work as promised in a country where manual labor comes cheaper than equipment, and easy for heavy weight airline lobby to flout the law. On an everyday basis the airlines generally prefer to keep disabled travelers in the dark and rather than giving them the choice of an ambulift to board with dignity, they prefer to carry them up stars leading to the aircraft door instead by 4 porters.

 Not all airlines/crafts have aisle chairs to assist disabled passengers to get to their seat. People with disabilities are carried physically in disrespectful manner to their seats. Since a disabled passenger is last to be boarded out there have been instances where at the night halting station, they have had to wait for over the total flying time for assistance to reach to help them board out of the flight.  More often than not a disabled person is expected to continue sitting precariously on a narrow and un-maintained aisle chair till the luggage claming area as the airline staff is just too lazy to get the passenger wheelchair from hold till the door of the aircraft that they are supposed to do.

 Websites of all Indian operators have far from adequate information available on ‘Carriage of Disabled Passengers’ as required by the CAR. This non provision of information seems a reflection of the ambiguous and unclear policies that the airline towards this. The uncertainty or the non compliance to the ‘Civil Aviation Requirement – Carriage of Disabled Persons’ in the management level permeates down well till the loading staff as none of them is confident about their responsibilities towards a disabled passenger.

 Examples of information that is available on some Low Cost Domestic airline websites :

• Go Air - In spite of the CAR denying the requirement of a medical certificate, GoAir requires a ‘Medical Fitness Certificate – ‘Fit to Fly as a Passenger’.
• IndiGo reserves the right to deny these special services if not requested in advance. Where as the CAR puts the onouce on the airlines for getting adequate information from the passenger at the time of booking, therefore the right to deny services does not apply.
• Spice Jet and Jetlite have some very scanty information given out of a passenger with special needs.

  It seems that the airlines purposefully do not provide all information on their site as is required by the recent CAR, as providing information on the website will make their faulty policies and procedures transparent to public scrutiny. If it becomes so then demanding Rs. 1685/- extra from disabled passengers just to be able to board the craft with dignity will no longer be possible.

 Conclusion

 Air travel presently is an extremely stressful activity for a disabled flyer. Passengers with disabilities are always at the mercy of the untrained staff to make their journey a bit better. Disabled passengers pay the same amount as any other passenger but the services provided to them are always substandard as compared to their non co passengers. This has been recognized to be so by the Government hence the issuing of the CAR. In spite of this there has been no improvement on the carriage of a disabled passenger. It is yet another classic example of non implementation of a Government policy. The only way that seem to be left to ensuring improvement is for people with disabilities, knowing about their rights as a flyer and demand to be treated respectfully each time. Finally, unless the Government is able to stand up to the strong air operators lobby, there can be no improvements that a disabled flyer can expect.