A Des Plaines woman has filed a lawsuit against Frontier Airlines saying the carrier lost a custom wheelchair she relies on to move about freely, then returned it damaged after several days.
Shannon O’Brien filed the lawsuit Tuesday in Cook County Circuit Court, saying she was without her wheelchair for around two days after her Frontier flight to Chicago had to make an emergency landing partway through, and when she got it back it was damaged. She accused Frontier of negligence.
O’Brien has spinal muscular atrophy, which limits her movements. She is not able to walk or hold her head or upper body straight when seated, and uses a custom wheelchair to get around, go to work and live her daily life. The wheelchair also supports her head to allow her to eat safely, she said in the lawsuit.
“What happens when this occurs is not just a question of inconvenience, it’s not just a question of baggage handling, it is literally depriving Shannon and others like her to live a life that she knows,” Lance Northcutt, her attorney, said at a news conference Wednesday. “No one should be bedridden because of the corporate inertia that has somehow got us to the point where we believe that some human beings should be treated so starkly different from others. Something has got to change.”
Frontier executives, in a statement, apologized to O’Brien and her family “for the significant inconvenience caused by the temporary absence of her wheelchair.”
“We had multiple team members working to reunite her with her chair and ultimately placed it on another airline to get it to her as quickly as possible,” they said. “She was provided contact information so that she could reach out to us at any time with any further concerns or issues. We have not heard from Ms. O’Brien since the wheelchair was returned to her in late November 2022.”
According to the lawsuit, O’Brien checked her wheelchair at the gate to board a flight in November 2022 from Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, to Chicago, to return home from a vacation with dozens of family members and friends. The plane had to make an emergency landing in Orlando, Florida, after a hydraulic malfunction, and after waiting more than an hour on the plane and then longer at baggage claim, passengers were told no bags could be removed from the plane, she said in the suit.
Before she reached baggage claim, a Frontier employee announced to passengers waiting at the baggage carousel that their luggage was delayed because a passenger in the wheelchair hadn’t left the plane, according to the lawsuit.
“This statement was false and served no purpose other than to scapegoat Shannon for the unfolding series of failures that occurred on the flight,” she said in the lawsuit.
O’Brien was carried off the plane in a transport chair, and spent hours delayed in Orlando without her wheelchair, she said in the lawsuit. The suit described exchanges back and forth with Frontier over when and where the wheelchair would arrive, before O’Brien ultimately got the wheelchair back some two days after her initial flight, according to the lawsuit.
When it was delivered, it was damaged, “in a partially disassembled state and with damage to the footplate,” she said in the lawsuit.
“Because these custom wheelchairs are treated like common luggage by commercial air carriers, they are subject to the same indiscriminate loss and damage that luggage is,” the lawsuit said.
Custom wheelchairs like O’Brien’s can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to build, Northcutt said.
O’Brien said at the news conference that she can’t be successful or independent without her wheelchair. Airplanes are the only form of transportation for which she has to be removed from the chair, she said.
“I’m doing this not just on behalf of myself, but so no one else has to go through this,” she said.
In September, Chicago-based United Airlines agreed to improve air travel for passengers in wheelchairs after the federal government investigated a complaint by a disability-rights advocate. In the complaint, Engracia Figueroa said her custom-made wheelchair was damaged on a United flight in 2021.
Figueroa died three months later, and family members and her lawyer blamed sores, skin grafts and emergency surgery on sitting for five hours in a manual wheelchair that did not fit her body.
United and the Transportation Department said the airline will add a filter to the booking tool on its website to help consumers find flights on which the plane can more easily accommodate their wheelchairs. The cargo doors on some planes are too small to easily get a motorized wheelchair in the belly of the plane.
The airline also agreed to refund the fare difference if a passenger has to take a more expensive flight to accommodate their wheelchair.
United said it expects to make the changes by early next year.
United also said it would start in 2023 a trial at George Bush Houston Intercontinental Airport to accommodate passengers whose wheelchairs are damaged or delayed, including reimbursing people for transportation if they don’t want to wait at the airport.
Paralyzed Veterans of America and other groups have cited Figueroa’s death as they push for new federal regulations to increase accessibility on airline planes.
According to the settlement, airlines mishandled 32,640 wheelchairs and scooters on domestic flights from 2019 through 2022 — a rate of 1.45%.
The Associated Press contributed