"Access to the Air: Airline Safety and Disability Rights in the 1970s"

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, physically disabled people were increasingly frustrated about airlines’ failure to facilitate their travel and airline regulators’ failure to intervene. While airplane manufacturers had poured tremendous amounts of time and money into the passenger experience, air travel had not been designed with the protection of physically disabled travelers in mind. Travelers willing and able to navigate physical hurdles, however, often found themselves turned away by airline staff who were skeptical about physically disabled travelers’ ability to fly on their own (regardless of what the passengers themselves said about their own abilities). While airlines were heavily regulated by both the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Federal Aviation Administration, on safety matters they had broad discretion to turn away passengers. Like the airlines themselves, airline regulation had not been designed with the protection of physically disabled travelers in mind. In the early 1970s, such travelers drew on an increasingly common set of rights claims to challenge airlines’ decisionmaking. Physically disabled travelers argued that they had a right to travel, that airlines (as federally regulated entities) had a duty to carry all passengers, and that airlines’ failure to accommodate them was discriminatory. They demanded that the federal government promulgate clearer rules that would limit the discretion of airline employees and protect their own ability to travel. Their demands, airlines’ resistance, and agencies’ slow response demonstrate the costs of regulatory deference to business “expertise” and raise broader questions about public interest group mobilization against regulated businesses.