TOKYO // A Japanese airline has apologised for making a wheelchair user hoist himself up the stairs from the tarmac to board his flight.
Hideto Kijima, 44, paralysed from the waist down, was returning last month to Osaka from a vacation in Amami, a small island off southern Japan
An employee of Vanilla Air, the budget affiliate of All Nippon Airways, said the tiny airport requires use of stairs and has no lift to safely carry a disabled person onto the plane. The company refused to let his friends carry him in his wheelchair or separately.
Mr Kijima said in a blog he was forced to crawl up the stairs using only his arms. The Asahi newspaper said the man pulled himself up some 17 steps.
Vanilla said on Wednesday it has apologised to Mr Kijima, and that new lifts were being installed.
“We’re sorry that we caused him that hardship,” a company spokesman said, adding the carrier has since made it mandatory to have lifts for disabled patrons at that airport.
The airline had previously barred passengers who could not walk from boarding a flight at Amami because it was dangerous to carry someone up the stairs, the spokesman said.
Mr Kijima, a frequent traveller outside Japan, told Nippon TV he was “surprised” when staff said he would not be able to fly if he could not walk up the stairs.
“I wondered if the airport employees didn’t think that was wrong,” he added.
The incident comes after a public relations fiasco on United Airlines in April, in which a 69-year-old doctor in the United States was dragged off an overbooked flight.
* Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
