Thank you. It's nice to see you.
You spoke at the last meeting about a number of distressing examples that have happened. The responses certainly express care, but I think they lack the required urgency. The defensive insistence on returning to language about 99% of passengers travelling without incident unfortunately minimizes the 1% who are experiencing debilitating and dehumanizing situations.
The data is a challenge and that's one of the reasons why I pointed to it in my report across all areas of accessibility. The challenge that I know exists in the data is this: When we talk about any person with a disability who might travel.... It's a very wide range of situations. Somebody might need assistance through the airport but not on the plane. Somebody needs to be manually transferred. Someone has an allergy. I'm sure many people travel without incident. However, I had three incidents last year alone where there were issues. I know there were 16 more faced by people I know very personally in my very small circle that happened within a six-month period last year. Many more reached out to my office after my incident. Certainly, I don't know all the people who have travelled. However, if that alone is the situation, it concerns me. I don't know anyone with a disability, personally, who hasn't had an issue travelling.
That data matters. That's why I talked about the need for much more discrete data. How many people with disabilities travelled? How many people travelled with manual wheelchairs? How many people travelled with power wheelchairs? How many people with one of those filed a complaint? How many of those people who didn't file a complaint had damage to their chair that was fixed but wasn't captured in the complaints? The complexity is there.