Southwest Airlines saves a lot of money on wheelchairs, now that they have assigned seats. Until late January, a wheelchair meant early boarding, and boarding order secured the best seats. Southwest had some of the highest wheelchair costs in the industry worldwide – after planes, people and petrol.
It’s remarkable how many Southwest Airlines passengers have recovered from their physical ailments since the change in seating policy on January 27th. However airlines globally still see passengers declaring wheelchair entitlements, even when it doesn’t get them better seating. It means,
- Priority check-in and security
- Early boarding
- Escort through the airport, saving long walks
- For some, a sense of VIP treatment without paying for it
Here are more than sixty wheelchairs prepped for a single flight to the U.S. from Taipei.
Taiwan to US…. this flight has over 60 wheelchair passengers with mobility issues. Barely any Taiwanese faces. Taiwan really is the hub collecting Southeast Asians before they head Stateside.
Maybe someone should just turn a budget airline into the official Wheelchair Airline.… pic.twitter.com/JSgosAyD7h— Fahad Naim (@Fahadnaimb) May 11, 2026
Air India reports that 30% of their passengers flying to the U.S. and U.K. request wheelchairs. The airline will process “over 100,000 wheelchair requests every month.” Of course, once everyone deplanes at their destination, a miracle occurs. They’re cured! They call this effect “Jetbridge Jesus.”
Passengers who request wheelchairs when they don’t really need them hog available wheelchairs and staff time pushing those chairs. It means there’s not available assistance for passengers who really need it, because some people take advantage of the system to skip queues. But when everyone has wheelchair priority, nobody does!
Clickbait to anger the masses? A month ago, I was on a flight with a WWII veterans group traveling back from DC and there were about 60 in the group and about 40 wheelchairs. My mother is almost 80 but looks much younger. She also can’t walk long distances and pull or carry luggage but sure people think she is faking it.
It’s definitely a thing in some communities from SE Asia. Lifestyle seems to play a part, though I suspect it’s also just laziness?
This makes me angry. My mother flies regularly from YYZ to CDG (and back). She needs a wheelchair on both ends, because she cannot walk more than 300m at a time without some pain in her legs. She is not the type of passenger who gets off the plane at the other end without waiting for the wheelchair; she stays seated until they are ready to help her with a wheelchair at the other end. Good thing this route doesn’t have too many fakers.
I married into an Asian family and Ill have to say its abused in my wife’s culture. Some of it is innocently deferential to elders wanting to keep them from stress but after a while its ridiculous.
My MIL is in her early 70s, does Zumba, physically efficient cleaning the house, squatting to do the floors yet the family calls for a wheelchair when she travels. Guess its like a mobile throne for the family head 🙂
A bunch of wheelchair fakers, and they are out there, is likely killing the profit margin on many flights. Even at an average of $10 per passenger you have 20 in a wheelchair that’s $200, often the profit margin, if any, or many flights. Not to mention the flight ends up going out late.
For all the people that will criticize back in the 1990s when I started to fly wheelchair passengers were far less common and usually it was evident of why they needed a wheelchair.
But today bad behavior is considered fashionable.
“It’s remarkable how many Southwest Airlines passengers have recovered from their physical ailments since the change in seating policy on January 27th.”
If it’s so remarkable, why aren’t you posting the decrease %age? I’d expect a Thought Leader to not just make an empty claim like that without having actual numbers to state why they see it as remarkable.
Same thing for the BR and AI flights – you talk about how many need it to board and say that “once everyone deplanes at their destination… They’re cured!” While I’m sure you don’t believe it’s “everyone”, I’m not seeing anything in this post that has any actual statistics (even something anecdotal like how many of those BR pax didn’t use the wheelchairs on arrival).
I watched 40+ wheelchair pax lined up and slowly carted off a few at a time for an arriving QR flight at DFW last month. The pax very clearly weren’t saving time waiting for their turn and nobody seemed to get up and walk off when realizing how long it would take.
Long rant is to say that this post talks a lot about numbers for how many need wheelchairs to get on the plane, but provides zero substance for how many few the chairs on the other side.
@theboywanderz — You meant: Clickbait to *sell ads, and apparently to hate on Asians. Oof.
@George Romey — Thanks for mentioning the greatest decade… *wink*
@Ben — *Thot* Leader
Wheelchairs? Please. At this rate, I fully expect sedan chairs and palanquins to make a comeback.
Quick fix: Wheelchair passengers are last to board the plane.
@Denver Refugee — But, what do we do about wheelchairs during evacuations? Leave em?
Wheelchairs on international flights are very route-specific. This has to do both with the age demographics of the people who fly as well as the cultural expectations for older people to walk (or not). India might be the worst of both in terms of number of people requesting wheelchair service. I once flew EWR-DEL as there were 131 wheelchair passengers on the flight. That is nearly half of the aircraft. The wheelchair lines at DEL or BOM to get through immigration are often hundreds of people deep. I think much of this has to do with the massive Indian population that lives abroad and the resulting number of elderly people traveling to visit family.