Dr Jurai Darongkamas has travelled all over the world with her mobility scooter and says she never had a problem until she booked a flight with Qantas earlier this year.
The 60-year-old clinical psychologist, who lives in the UK city of Birmingham, flew to Sydney on Thai Airways without issue but was not allowed to board her connecting Qantas flight to her holiday destination in New Zealand.
At the heart of Darongkamas’s dispute with Qantas is whether her scooter is a mobility aid, as she argues, or a personal electronic device, as the airline insisted during a six-month long complaints process.
Qantas says it aims to be the “airline of choice for customers with specific needs”, but Darongkamas says Qantas is the only carrier that hasn’t let her fly with her Topmate ES33 scooter and its 281Wh lithium battery.
She said the experience on the day “hammered home the fact that I am no longer as able as I was … and people can do what they like” and that the complaint process “just compounded the feeling of powerlessness”.
Darongkamas wants Australia’s largest airline to apologise for her experience and ensure it doesn’t happen to any other disabled passengers.
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Many airlines have tightened their restrictions on flying with lithium-ion batteries, often found in mobility devices, to try to avoid any possibility of a fire breaking out onboard.
Qantas’s policy says mobility aids are permitted with lithium batteries of up to 300Wh, as long as the batteries can be removed from the devices and taken into the cabin, which Darongkamas says she always does.
Darongkamas, who is unable to walk for long due to chronic sesamoiditis, argues it shouldn’t be up to Qantas to decide which aid someone with a disability can use.
“Other ones are too heavy for me. I don’t need to tell [that] to Qantas. It is my choice,” she said.
Mobility aid or personal electronic device?
Before Darongkamas and her partner left for their trip, Qantas’s dangerous goods team told them her scooter was classed as a “personal electronic device” according to International Air Transport Association (Iata) regulations.
Iata does not name specific manufacturers in its guidance document for battery-powered mobility aids. It says any lithium batteries must have a UN 38.3 certification, which the Topmate ES33 does. On its website, Topmate says the ES33 battery can be taken on a plane.
A Topmate spokesperson told Guardian Australia the ES33 “is indeed designed and intended for use as a mobility aid” and that the battery was “certified and safe for air travel when handled in accordance with relevant regulations”.
An Iata spokesperson said airlines have to “consider and balance the needs of the passenger traveling with the mobility aid and the safety of the aircraft and its passengers when deciding whether or not it can accept a mobility aid for transport.”
The manual Darongkamas provided Qantas as part of her complaint after the incident, seen by the Guardian, describes the ES33 as a “disability scooter”.
Qantas appeared to have cited a different user manual, available online, when it doubled downand told Darongkamas her scooter was “a bike, electric bike, tricycle or electric tricycle” and she couldn’t fly with it.
However, two days later, Qantas’s customer specific needs team emailed asking for the dimensions of “Jurai’s mobility aid” and confirmed the “mobility aid details” had been added to their booking.
Thinking everything was sorted, Darongkamas and her partner left on 31 December. At Sydney airport on 2 January, they were told “at the last minute” they couldn’t get on their flight to New Zealand.
After a night in the airport hotel, Qantas put them on an Air New Zealand flight to Wellington, which Darongkamas says accepted the scooter and battery.
Disability advocates say they are working with the Australian federal government to implement clear accessibility standards after last year’s release of the aviation whitepaper, which sets out a plan for the sector until 2050.
The acting chief executive of People With Disabilities Australia, Megan Spindler-Smith, said inconsistency between different airlines’ rules is a “massive problem”.
‘A disappointing experience’
In February, Qantas told Darongkamas “we sincerely apologise for any lack of clarity” and offered a refund of $616 in February for the two business class seats they had booked on the flight to Wellington. She refused the refund, aiming instead to achieve an outcome that ensured her “horrible experience” would not “happen to future travellers”.
In April, Darongkamas escalated her complaint to the industry-funded Airline Customer Advocate (ACA), with no success.
The Albanese government has promised to replace the ACA with an independent aviation ombudsman from next year.
In July, before it closed Darongkamas’s case, Qantas apologised for giving her conflicting advice but said the information availablestill did not satisfy that the ES33 had been “manufactured as a mobility aid” to the required safety standards.
Qantas said even though it “repeatedly liaised” with Topmate in China the manufacturer was unable to supply the required information about the battery’s test standards. Guardian Australia put this claim to Topmate, but the company did not directly respond to the question.
“We understand this would have been a disappointing experience for Ms Darongkamas and acknowledge that our communication with her during the process may have been confusing,” a Qantas spokesperson said.
Qantas said it has improved the communication between its dangerous goods and specific needs team.
Speaking generally, Erin Turner Manners, a senior solicitor at the Justice and Equity Centre, said airlines have obligations under discrimination and consumer law but this hasn’t prevented discrimination and poor customer experiences.
She said airlines should be investing in making their services accessible and that people with disability shouldn’t have to “take on big corporations like airlines and airports” to get a fair outcome.