A video of Delta Atlanta Airport workers dropping a wheelchair...aaaahhhh!

[mamabunny]

This is why I’m afraid to take my powerchair on a flight. Because of these horror stories of the ground crew ruining 30, 40 thousand dollar chairs.

I get it.

But that Delta incident is the exception, not the norm. There are thousands of people who fly with power chairs and all manner of mobility equipment every day without a problem.

The ones that complain on forums about how their equipment was damaged - or the YouTube videos like the Atlanta incident - stand out simply because no one really discusses how much of a non-issue it is to fly with your chair.

By taking a few precautions (I know that, for example, @SueM in MN has said before that they remove certain pieces of her daughter's chair, and carry them into the cabin) I think that most folks have no real problems.

As far as risk goes, it's probably about the same as losing a piece of luggage - and for the record, I'm NOT comparing your chair being damaged with the mere loss of a suitcase, simply pointing out that both are handled by the same ground crews.

Ironically, we drive more often than we fly, simply because we love the road trip to/from WDW. Flying is wonderful, and fast, and magical, and it gets you there in a day... but driving costs us about the same, and we get to have that "space" between Disney and the "real world" that allows us to get into our vacation mindset on the trip down (playing our carefully curated Disney playlists and singing along at the top of our lungs to our favorite songs) and then time to decompress on the way home and revisit our favorite memories and ease back into the real world, before we hit the harsh realities of jobs, housework, and everyday life.