Robert Silk
The air travel industry is in need of improvement when it comes to serving travelers with disabilities. Anyone would tell you that.
So, it's soul-lifting when I learn about a new innovation that has begun to help.
I had such an experience at the recent Future Travel Experience Expo in Long Beach, Calif., where I spent time with a vendor named Whill Mobility Services, whose autonomous wheelchairs are now assisting American Airlines travelers at the Los Angeles and Miami airports and Alaska Airlines passengers at Seattle-Tacoma Airport.
Abroad, the chairs are in use at Winnipeg Airport in Manitoba and at airports in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan.
It's important to note that these devices aren't deployed for individuals who can't walk. Airline and airport contractors still always use attendants for those customers.
But they're an appealing option for the many people who are able to walk in their daily routines but who need wheelchair assistance to cover the long distances that are often required at airport terminals. Such cases amount to 80% of wheelchair requests, said Shane Bogni, Whill's vice president of business development for North America.
Tres Izzard, Whill's president for North America, said many such flyers prefer the autonomy and independence of not having a wheelchair attendant.
So, what does an autonomous wheelchair operation look like? It's pretty simple.
Before each mission, the chair is programmed to go to the designated gate. The machine can see people and obstacles, so as it maneuvers about, it will stop if someone is in the way. As I witnessed during my demonstration at the conference, it will even politely ask the offending pedestrian to move, if necessary, after a few seconds of being stopped.
In Winnipeg, users can even pause the chair for a bathroom break or for a grab-and-go restaurant item. Envoy, the American Airlines subsidiary and concessionaire that partners with Whill in Miami and LAX, also plans to implement those capabilities next year, communications director Adam Simmons said.
Once the chair lets its passenger off at the gate, it makes its way back to the post-security wheelchair lounge alone.
Envoy has 10 chairs each deployed at Miami and LAX, where they serve approximately 120 flyers daily, Simmons said. Thus far, Envoy chairs have performed approximately 50,000 missions without a safety incident, he added.
Simmons said Envoy mostly uses the chairs to smooth operations. The company received union approval before signing with Whill, he said, so the goal isn't to replace workers. The autonomous capabilities are especially helpful during the several periods a day in which hub airlines surge their flying from an airport in order to facilitate convenient flight connections.
As for flyers, they use the autonomous chairs on a voluntary basis.
Like Izzard, Simmons said that many mobility-limited flyers get excited about the opportunity.
"They are curious about them. They want to get onboard with it," he said.
Whill expects to be in more U.S. airports in the coming months.
And it's not the only vendor that is offering an autonomous wheelchair product for airports. Two other companies that exhibited at the Future Travel Experience show, Italy-based Alba Robot and Ontario-based Cyberworks Robotics, both said they've conducted trials at U.S. airports. One feature of the Alba chair is that it can be reprogrammed midtrip in the case of a gate change. Cyberworks, meanwhile, partners with global wheelchair developer Sunrise Medical and self-driving technology developer Bosch on its autonomous chair.