Texas-based Southwest Airlines and American Airlines are joining with Delta, JetBlue and United Airlines to ask a court to overturn a rule requiring them to meet higher standards for accommodating passengers with disabilities.
The airlines say the Biden-era rule exceeds the U.S. Department of Transportation’s authority. Then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg described it as a way to hold airlines accountable for not treating passengers with disabilities fairly.
Madlin Mekelburg has been following this story for Bloomberg. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: When was this rule put forward and has it been put into effect?
Madlin Mekelburg: So this rule was adopted in the final month of the Biden administration, officially in December, and it was set to go into effect as early as January this year and until June. There’s a lot of different components to it. So the idea is that it would have been implemented on a rolling basis.
So a lot of components to it. But what in general does it require?
The idea behind this rule is that, across the board, they’re seeking to raise the standards for how airlines are supposed to treat passengers that use mobility devices. So we’re talking about wheelchairs, scooters, walkers, anything that fits under that category.
And it requires “safe and dignified,” is the language they use in the rule, assistance to passengers who are flying on airlines with those devices. It imposed new training requirements for airline staff across the board.
And one key feature is that it heightens penalties for airlines when there’s damage that occurs for one of these mobility devices. The requirement is that they have to return them in the same condition they received them in to passengers, and if not, they’d have to pay a series of fees.
They’d also be responsible for providing transportation accommodation to these passengers to and from the airport in the event that they’ve damaged their device.
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So why did the Biden administration say that it was necessary to raise the standard for people with disabilities on airlines?
The [U.S. Department of Transportation] had been implementing various case-by-case enforcement against airlines when they saw violations or problems with their treatment of passengers that use these devices. And so the idea behind these regulations was to create uniformity in the market.
But this is an issue that passengers with disabilities experience on a pretty high frequency when they’re using air travel. One of the statistics the department shared is that for every 100 wheelchairs or scooters that are transported on domestic flights, at least one is damaged, delayed or lost.
And so that can cause a lot of issues on the pipeline of travel for these individuals and obviously affect their quality of life significantly.
Which court is this case headed to? And what do we know about the argument that the airlines are making so far?
They’re asking the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans to review this rule. You’re probably very familiar with them. That’s where all federal cases filed in Texas are appealed to. They’re one of the most conservative in the country. But it’s the pretty standard chain of events to challenge an agency rule directly with a court of appeals.
And at this point, we don’t know the full extent of the legal argument against these rules. They’ve kind of just filed this initial paperwork indicating that they plan to present evidence and argue for why this rule should be overturned.
But the gist of it is that they believe that this rule exceeds the agency’s authority to regulate airlines. And one thing that Airlines for America, which is a lobbying group that represents all of the airlines that have filed this lawsuit, they told me that this is an issue that they’ve been working on as an industry for the past few years, to improve experiences for passengers with disabilities.
And so I think there’s a little bit of chafing there that maybe we don’t need the government to tell us what to do, because we’re kind of self-imposing some regulations here.
You write about this in the broader context of the Trump administration’s attack on DEI. That’s diversity, equity and inclusion, an acronym that sometimes has an added A for accessibility. Could you remind us of what’s happening there?
That’s right. So President Trump has been really targeting these DEI initiatives throughout the federal government and with federal government contractors, which are private companies.
And one thing that’s of particular interest here is that we heard from disabled workers after Trump suggested that DEI programs, including those favoring disabled workers, might have contributed to the fatal commercial airliner crash that happened in Washington last month. You heard a lot of concern from disabled workers about what those comments might suggest about how the president views accessibility programs and policies.
We haven’t seen the full extent of what those actions might look like on the administration’s part, but I think it’s something that challenges like this certainly shine a light on those policies, and it’s going to provide a stage for the Trump administration to have to defend or respond to these allegations.
Any word on whether the Trump administration would defend this rule?
It’s way too early to see at this point, but this creates an opportunity where the Trump administration is going to have to show its hand a little bit as far as how it sees these policies that were passed by the Biden administration.
