Wanted: Airline To Accommodate People With Autism

This was supposedly a post about tips on how to travel by air with a child with autism.  But  this idea dawned on me while searching for the link about the incident of a mom and child with autism being booted off an airplane.

I am glad I live in the Philippines and people here are more kind and compassionate.  The airline is friendly  and the passengers in the flight we were in have children with them too. So my first travel by air with my daughter last December 2008 was not as dreadful as I anticipated it to be.

Yes I anticipated “hell” on her first airplane flight together having in mind how horrible the experience would be for her with  the noise inside the plane while  suspended 30,000 feet above the ground.  People on the autism spectrum are very sensitive to sound and light.

Also after reading about the first incident where a mom with her child with autism was kicked off an Americal Eagle plane last June 2008, I become very concerned about my travel arrangements abroad  with my daughter.

I could imagine the trauma of that experience of having been removed from a plane just because there are so many unfriendly skies for differently abled people.  I am not just talking for my daughters sake but for others who had disabilities because most airlines are not equipped for them.  They feel the exclusion rather than the compassion and kidness.  Most would rather want them “locked in their homes” as not to “distrurb the peace and convenience” of the average “normal” people.

A few weeks after that incident American Eagle incident a Southwest Airlines left an entire family composing of a mother of four kids one child with autism and another with cerebral palsy, her sister who is 5 months pregnant for being “too disruptive”.  They paid a whole $2,000 to book their connecting flight from Phoenix to Seattle but the airline left them at Phoenix without any airline staff having said anything to them.

This is so scary.  Why does it have to be that the people with disabilities are the ones taking care of them are the ones who have to adjust for the convenience of the general able population.  They can take care of themselves, they can do anything they want, the differently able can’t.

Maybe it’s time that the government all over the world will take a look at this and probably have some unit dedicated for people in the Autism Spectrum and other disability  so they too can have the benefit of traveling conveniently and fast like the average able people can.

If the airline companies are worried that they will not have enough passenger to dedicate one of their airplane units for the differently abled they they can include senior citizens, any family traveling with kids, and pregnant women.  But I don’t think they will not fail in this one there are 500 million people with disabilities worldwide. Also  I think if families taking care of differently abled people know about such a friendly airline they will be booking in no time.

This is not segmenting them but if we are all looking for convenience on the part of all passengers then this is the best option.  In the U.K. I heard that excluding people in the Autism Spectrum to the rest of the population is in violation of a law but I don’t think this excludes them in fact this gives importance to them as a part of the general population.

Here in the Philippines we have a general law about Persons with Disability and people on the Autism Spectrum is included in that law anyone who ridicules, put to shame and any similar incident is penalized by law either imprisonment or damages or both.  I haven’t heard of bad incidence reported in the media but I am sure there are. Personally I experience the looks and rude comments but since I was the one who understands better I let it pass and let God do his work that more people understand autism and accept them as human.

In Canada a family was asked to leave a family restaurant after a fellow patron complained. Apparently, Sarah Seymour’s five year old girl started throwing a fit when she learned that her favorite meal was not on the menu that night.

It appeared that since the airplane incidents happened in the U.S. that they don’t have a law to protect people in the autism spectrum.  Well I hope the new President Barrack Obama do something, although he was caught off-guard on Jay Leno showing mocking people with disability but he apologized for that rude comment a day after.

In Florida a teacher put a child with autism to shame by asking the child to stand in front of the class and have her student to vote what they did not like about out him and why he should be out of their class.   In other parts of America a teenage boy with Autism was banned from attending church because the priest was afraid of their parishioners safety. The priest filed a restraining order to keep the child away from that church.

Do parents of autistic children bear the burden of ensuring that their kids do not ever make other people uncomfortable? Certainly that is part of the goal for all children, especially autistic kids who tend to have outbursts. But do the companies also share the burden to accommodate all of their patrons–regardless of disability?

In the end, although it is always the parents’ responsibility to make sure their children were up for the challenge  people could be a little more understanding of a family that clearly is trying to teach a child how to interact with the public. How else will they learn?  A little understanding on the general public is what we ask a few minutes to disrupt your “normal” way and “peace”, you don’t have to take it everyday like we do.

(P.S. I will post about the my successful experience about the first time I travelled by air with my child in the autism spectrum next time, this post is too long already, I don’t want to bore you.)