The Bewildering World of Disability Airport Escorts

It doesn’t have to be this hard… or strange… or vaguely threatening

Listen to me read this post on my podcast

I walk in the departures door at an airport. Which airport it is doesn’t really matter. Neither does the airline. I know, generally, what is about to happen.

The first part is the check-in-counter dance. The opening section goes like this. I tell the agent at the counter that I need assistance to the gate. They contact someone, and tell me to wait for “5 minutes,” or “fifteen minutes,” or “until someone’s available,” or “a bit.” All of these phrases mean the same thing, including the ones with allegedly concrete numbers of minutes: “I don’t know when or if anyone is coming for you.” So I stand in the vicinity of the counter. Or sometimes in a designated area for passengers waiting for escorts: the disabled, the very old, and the very young.

The waiting is fraught. It’s full of calculations about what to do if the escort doesn’t materialize. I start with my plane’s departure time and work backwards, estimating how long security and walking through the terminal will take, to decide when I need to start bugging the check-in counter people about where the escort is. There are a lot of unknown variables in this equation. I know with an airline escort, I’ll skip most of the security line. But I don’t know how far it is to the gate, or how effective my prodding the check-in people about the escort will be. Also, most escorts think blind people walk at the speed of an exceptionally lazy butterfly. It is usually impossible to convince them otherwise. So I have to factor in the amount of time I will waste puttering along and saying, “Yes, you can walk at your normal speed. No, just nodding and smiling at me wasn’t the reaction I wanted. I want us to walk faster. We are walking faster? I don’t think we are walking faster. It sounds like a toddler just passed us.”

If I poke the check-in counter people a couple times, and no escort is forthcoming, I say, “Okay, thanks for trying. I’m just going to go myself.” This is a lie. I am not going to go myself. But this lie typically sends them into a panic, which is what I want. They don’t know how blind people get around. So, I assume, they imagine me stumbling around the terminal, lost, confused, bowling people over, screaming for help, as I walk outside on to the tarmac and get run over by a plane. Or something like that. I don’t know. Anyway, an escort suddenly appears.

The dance enters its second section. The escort is pushing a wheelchair. There is no one in the wheelchair. The wheel chair is for me. I do not need a wheelchair. I am blind. Blind people are the ones who can’t see. Our legs are fine. If I needed a wheelchair, someone would have told you that. The check-in-counter person did not tell you that. Who told you that?