The Unfriendly Skies, Or Post-Traumatic Airlines Syndrome

Reading the comments on the New York Times online in response to the distressing story of United Airlines re-routing a plane to remove a family traveling with an autistic teen from a domestic flight has left me with post-traumatic airlines syndrome.

We've had our share of airline and airport meltdowns, and the comments on this Times article have left me with flashbacks of the judgmental comments and snide asides of people who seemed to only have experience in drive-by parenting.

My comment on the New York Times site isn't yet posted (they moderate their comments), but here's what I wrote (with links added to the fuller details on this blog):

As the parent of a 17-year-old on the autism spectrum, many of these comments break my heart. Our girl also has challenging food requirements; we have to carry food with us on almost all flights. We need to keep the food from spoiling, so we have tried to use ice packs. Try getting ice packs through a TSA check point. Have a go at that. 

One airline – which had promised us (a family of 3) seats together – decided, on the morning of the flight, that we could all sit separately. This took 45 tense minutes prior to the flight to almost solve. And this was after we had already arrived 3 hours early (at 4am) to ensure we'd get disability seating. We were all already exhausted before we even boarded.

We do as much as possible to plan ahead. Sometimes it's just not possible. 

But it is distressing to read all these comments second-guessing the mom:

• Keep a hot meal ready at hand? Sure thing. 

• Always speak with total courtesy to dismissive flight attendants. Check. 

• Walk 1,000 miles rather than take a commercial flight. Got it. 

• Pony up for first class at $1000+ per seat. Whatever you say. Will do that right after our health insurance reimburses us for the therapy we have to fight about every month or agrees to cover the medication our daughter needs for her gastrointestinal issues. 

• Call the airline ahead. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.

Stay home and lock your kid in a closet seems to be what you're recommending. That was fashionable in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Sorry, I'm just not down with that solution. 

Thankfully things have changed a little. But obviously not enough.

•  •  • 

Do I sound angry and snarky? I think I might. I'm sorry. Sometimes I am angry and snarky. Sometimes I'm not diplomatic. Sometimes I'm tired. Sometimes I wonder what happened to human kindness. Sometimes I find myself humming a Grateful Dead tune: "Oh, oh what I waaaannnt to know is are you kind?" Seems an increasingly rare quality.

Be kind. Do better. Walk a mile. All that.

Autism and Airlines: How Can Airlines Make Travel Easier?

Now that we're done getting ready for the impending arrival of Hurricane Irene, I'm catching up some blogging that didn't happen this week. We had to lay in some provisions – bottled water, some food, flash lights, sheet plastic and gaffer's tape. And we had to move our garden off the fire escape.  And we had to recharge everything that has batteries. And now I guess we're about as set as we can be and I can get back to things that were meant to happen Thursday, including blogging about the rest of our experience with Virgin America.

You might have read about our awful experience with Virgin America last week.  Once we were back in New York their customer service department contacted us, expressed their apologies, and credited us for the cost of our flight.

But they did something even more important than that.

They asked us how their airline could make traveling for people on the spectrum and their families easier.

I said that I had my own ideas, but that the spectrum is broad and that we should hear from adults on the spectrum as well as parents.  So I said I would post their question to the autism and nuerodiversity community.

What would you like airlines to do to make your travel with them easier?

Please post your comments and @virginamerica will use your suggestions in upcoming employee training.  Thanks, everyone.

Virgin America: No Accommodations for Autism Families

Virgin America: No accommodations for ASD teen.

Over the past months I've done quite a lot of traveling for work, much of it on what was my new favorite (until today) airline: Virgin America.  I'd had such great experiences that I was excited to introduce the girl and her dad to the cool purple-tinted interiors, funny flight instruction videos, and back of seat tv-entertainment centers on our flight back to New York.

When I saw that we weren't going to be able to get seat assignments together on the online booking, I called Virgin America and explained that we'd be traveling with a teenager with an autism spectrum disorder and asked if they'd be able to provide the typical disability seating that other airlines have provided for her — seated near the front so as to have most limited stimulus and contact with other passengers, and, of course, seated with us.  I was assured that this would be no problem, as long as we got to the airport two hours early. So I booked the flight.

We got to the airport two hours early — at 5:40 am — and checked at the ticket counter, as I'd been told to do.  She looked at our boarding passes for three separate seats scattered throughout the cabin and said she couldn't help us, but that customer service on the other side of security would definitely be able to help us.

After we made it through the long line for security, we got to the customer service desk, where we were told that we would not be able to have seats together. When I objected, they said, well, they'd try to get us seats together, but there were no guarantees. When I said that we needed disabilities seating with reduced contact with other passengers, the guy at the counter looked at me like I was out of my mind. Our girl's dad even had a typed note with this information that he'd handed to the customer service agent who handed it back as though he couldn't read or, or more likely, just didn't care.

After three phone calls to customer service, they somehow managed to find two seats together, so that the girl and her dad could sit side by side.  My seat was elsewhere.  Customer service kept insisting that we were seated together even though we weren't -- we were in entirely different rows, at the back of the plane, where our girl would have maximum contact with passengers coming and going from the lavatory.

Though one never wishes for one's kid to have a meltdown — the toll is just too high on them — there are those times when one wishes that you could give clueless airline agents just a little taste of the disaster that they are courting by not taking an autism spectrum disability seriously. By blowing off a request for reasonable accommodation (that they had already assured us would be available before we booked the flight).  By acting like we were making this all up so that we could have cooler seats.  Yeah, right.  I've decided to get my kid a life-long neurological disorder so I can get preferential seating on airplanes.

I wonder why it is that we get better disability accommodations on every other airline we've ever flown, even on frumpy old American Airlines. All I can figure is that Virgin America is just too cool to make reasonable accommodations. After all, having disabilities is just so not fashionable.  Or maybe it's that they're really not Virgin America, and therefore are not acquainted with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's pretty hard to figure this one out.

But so much for putting the fun back in air travel.  As far as this family is concerned, Virgin America is a big old able-ist FAIL.