We tried to put one of our girls in her pediatric motorized chair on Aladdin last week, but it didn't work. The side of the special vehicle opens out and some part of it folds down to form a ramp. Then the operators have to remove the back seat of the vehicle--reminded me of taking the bench seat out of our minivan. Then the wheelchair is supposed to go up the ramp into the space left where the seat was, but the ramp has a raised area down the middle, and the battery under our DD's chair hung up on it. A manual chair wouldn't have had a problem. Didn't notice how big a chair it might have held; I was too busy trying to figure out how to un-hang up DD's chair!
I'm pleased to see Disney try to make a ride like this usable by someone who can't transfer out of their chair, especially since we are finding fewer and fewer rides we can manage to transfer our teenage girls onto, but their solution was a little puzzling. It took a lot of time for the cast members to disassemble the vehicle, and they had a terrible time getting the vehicle's seat rolled back in (it hung up on the ramp just like the wheelchair did!) and locked back into place to put it all back together. The wheelchair-accessible Buzz Lightyear vehicle worked much better. I presume they didn't want to leave an Aladdin carpet open all the time for wheelchairs because of ride capacity, but the length of time it takes to mess with the special vehicle has the effect of reducing capacity, too, so one vehicle devouted to chairs might not be all that unreasonable. The demand sure seemed to be there--counting our two, there were three kids with wheelchairs riding Aladdin at once that morning and more wheelchairs in the parks than I remember ever seeing on past trips.
I'm pleased to see Disney try to make a ride like this usable by someone who can't transfer out of their chair, especially since we are finding fewer and fewer rides we can manage to transfer our teenage girls onto, but their solution was a little puzzling. It took a lot of time for the cast members to disassemble the vehicle, and they had a terrible time getting the vehicle's seat rolled back in (it hung up on the ramp just like the wheelchair did!) and locked back into place to put it all back together. The wheelchair-accessible Buzz Lightyear vehicle worked much better. I presume they didn't want to leave an Aladdin carpet open all the time for wheelchairs because of ride capacity, but the length of time it takes to mess with the special vehicle has the effect of reducing capacity, too, so one vehicle devouted to chairs might not be all that unreasonable. The demand sure seemed to be there--counting our two, there were three kids with wheelchairs riding Aladdin at once that morning and more wheelchairs in the parks than I remember ever seeing on past trips.
