مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The majority of airline passengers are able-bodied and require no assistance. However there are some who are disabled either temporarily (because of unfamiliar surroundings, distances, noises and processes) or permanently (because of ageing, obesity, medical or mental problems or self-declared disabilities) and who will require airline assistance. The exact number of disabled persons or persons with reduced mobility (hereafter referred to as PRMs) who travel by air is not known but in Europe Steer Davies Gleave (2010) estimated it to be in the range of 0.2e1.2% of the total air passengers in 2009. Specifically within the United Kingdom (UK) numbers vary from around 650,000 at London Heathrow (0.95% of the total), 324,000 at London Gatwick (0.93%), 75,000 (0.32%) at London Stansted and 181,000 (0.84%) at Manchester (Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), 2010).

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), it is predicted that between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s rapidly ageing population over 60 years old will double from about 11% to 22%, from 605 million to two billion (WHO, 2012). The WHO also estimated that in 2008 more than 1.4 billion adults were overweight, with more than half a billion obese, and that this number doubled between 1980 and 2008 (WHO, 2013). In addition, there is a growing number of people who are travelling for medical needs. For example Lunt et al. (2014) examined UK medical tourism and noted that over 50,000 individuals from the UK each year elect to fund their own medical treatment abroad for reasons including cosmetic and dental, cardio, orthopaedic and bariatric surgery, and organ and tissue transplantation. For some countries, such as the UK, there may also be inbound medical tourists who use the National Health Service, with estimates of around 52,000 in 2010 (Lunt et al., 2014). Within Europe IPK (2013) found that health and medical travel represented 9.4 million trips in 2011 (by all transport modes), and highlighted that up to 53% of Europeans said they would travel abroad for medical treatment. Although no specific data could be found related to how many ageing, obese and medical travellers are treated as PRMs for air travel, it is considered reasonable to assume that as these groups grow, so will the number of PRMs. Depending on the level and type of disability, these PRMs often do not fit the mainstream passenger model on which airlines plan facilities and services from which they could leverage economies of scale.

The European Union Regulation No EC1107/2006 (Commission of the European Communities (CEC), 2006; European Commission, 2009) prohibits the refusal of airlines to carry passengers on the basis of reduced mobility (except for aircraft safety concerns) and requires that airports and airlines provide services and facilities for PRMs free of charge. It is therefore unlawful for an airline to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide a service in the standard or manner of service or on the terms on which the service is offered to members of the public. The EC definition of a disabled person or passenger with reduced mobility, which has been adopted for this paper is: ‘ … any person whose mobility when using transport is reduced due to any physical disability (sensory or locomotor, permanent or temporary), intellectual disability or impairment, or any other cause of disability, or age, and whose situation needs appropriate attention and the adaptation to his or her particular needs of the service made available to all passengers’. (CEC, 2006, article 2a).