THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES

Yeah, yeah! This guy might look like one of my headbanging buddies, but he's not. He's actually a guy named Baraka Kanaan and he's disabled. He lost the use of his legs after a bad car crash in 2000. Would you believe me if I told you that Delta Airlines made this man crawl across the tarmac multiple times because they refused to help him off their flights? And now he is suing them for it! What the hell is going on with our service industry? The fast food industries have gone down the toilet as we've seen in my blogs and now it seems the airline industry is no better. I do, however, notice that it's the same industries every single time! 

So, Kanaan, a former philosophy professor who now heads a not-for-profit organization, was scheduled to fly from his home in Hawaii to Nantucket Island in Massachusetts last July to attend a conference. Kanaan claims that he contacted the airline weeks in advance to tell them of his disability. According to him, Delta staff assured him that he would be received and given reasonable accommodation for his disability. When the flight touched down in Massachusetts, there was no equipment to help him off the airplane and to his wheelchair. When he asked what can be done, the flight attendant allegedly told him, "I don't know, but we can't get you off the plane." So, what was he supposed to do? Stay on the plane? When did people become so lazy? Better yet, why wasn't there a wheelchair waiting for him as soon as the doors opened? 

According to a lawsuit filed my Kanaan this months, he said he was left with no other option but to crawl in his best suit, hand over hand through the main cabin and down a narrow flight of stairs and across the tarmac to his wheelchair. On his return flight, he was forced to go through the same humiliating experience since the airline still claimed that they can do nothing to help his disability. This time the airline offered to place cardboard underneath him, so that his clothes wouldn't get dirty. Aw, that was very nice of them! Not! What a bunch of a**holes work for Delta! They should have had EMTs or a couple of stronger men helping to carry Kanaan to and from a wheelchair. I've seen it done on many flights. This is just laziness and discrimination to those with disabilities. 

After complaining to the airline, Kanaan said he was offered $100 voucher and an offer of 25,000 SkyMiles. Unreal! Corporate America just blows me away with their audacity sometimes. How is this acceptable? If this was someone in their family, it would be a different story, but being that it's not, who cares, right? If there's one airline that I'd like to see go bankrupt, it's Delta. They consistently have horror stories like this. It blows me away that people still fly their airline. I guess you get what you pay for. Cheap flight, no service!