ONBOARD ESSENTIALS

BOARDING
Airport assistance will also make sure that, either you get a wheelchair and be wheeled around or guided throughout the airport, or they will take you up to the gate and to the door of the airplane, where you can transfer onto an aisle chair or sky chair and be lifted up onto the plane and taken to your seat.

Arrange for an aisle chair or sky chair so you can board the plane AND to remain on the plane during the flight. It happened on an EVA Airway flight where neither happened and the flight was long and well, way too long.

WHEELCHAIR PARTS
Airports, airlines and cargo handlers don't care about your wheelchair as much as you do. Think about your wheelchair and its parts. Are the armrests loose? Footrests loose? What about batteries and/or other eletrical devices on motorized wheelchairs or scooters? Are they something you worry about?

Your wheelchair may have several parts: armrests, foot rests, a motorized wheelchair has a battery pack, etc. Airline cargo handlers are not the most delicate. Why should they? They lug and throw heavy luggage all day. A wheelchair is probably minimally more sacred to them. I've had a couple of spokes broken and some dings on my wheelchairs throughout the years due to cargo handler carelessness.

So, you may want to disassemble some parts of your wheelchair before you leave your wheelchair into the hands of the unknown. Take those parts with you on the plane.

YOUR OWN WHEELCHAIR
If you have a manual chair, I would suggest you take your wheelchair up to the door of the plane. Once there, you can transfer out of your chair and onto an aisle chair. This might sound a bit controlling but, like baby carriages, you have a little more guarantee that your wheelchair gets taken down to the luggage compartment, gets handled a bit better than a automated luggage carriage belts, which drop off your chair at the bottom of the belt line. Make sure you get your wheelchair brought up to the door of the plane at your destination. Let the airlines via phone and the customer service representative at the ticket counter know this ahead of time. Call the airlines and again, confirm at the ticket counter.

In addition, make sure you communicate to the flight attendants that your wheelchair - and not the airport's wheelchair - should be brought up to the door of the plane when you arrive at your destination. And, a few minutes before the plane lands, remind the flight attendants that you will need an aisle chair to be brought to you. On several occasions on Asian airlines, the flight attendants had forgotten to facilitate an aisle chair, leaving me to wait for inordinate amounts of time.