‘Air Canada needs to step up’: Disabled B.C. man forced to drag himself off plane
Air Canada flight in Las Vegas after the airline’s third-party ground assistance personnel were not available to help him.Prince George resident Rodney Hodgins says he’s going to push for changes to ensure no other disabled person endures what he experienced.“I don’t want anybody else to have to go through that,” he said in a phone interview. “I would like a change within their policies or how they do things.
Air Canada needs to step up.”Hodgins, 49, who can’t walk due to spastic cerebral palsy, said he originally thought the flight attendant was joking when he told him he would have to get himself off the airplane, but was shocked and angry when he was asked a second time to disembark without support.“Can you get to the front of the plane?” he quoted the flight attendant as asking. “I said, ‘Of course I can’t.
I’m in a wheelchair. I can’t walk.’ ”The hardware salesman said he was forced to use the strength of his upper body to pull himself down the airplane aisle, while his wife, Deanna, held his legs, which cannot move.Hodgins said the experience, which occurred this past August when he and his wife were travelling to celebrate an anniversary, left him feeling violated.“Especially when I’m sitting there in that chair and that flight attendant says to me, ‘Can you get to the front of the plane,’ ‘ he said.
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