Future Flight: an opportunity for more accessible air travel?

Abstract

Future Flight, which involves the development and proposed adoption of new aeronautical technologies and built environments including uncrewed aircraft, air taxis and vertiports, is presented as an opportunity to revolutionise commercial air travel. This article discusses current barriers to accessible aviation and asks whether (and how) future aviation systems can be more accessible.

Keywords:

• Air travel
• disability
• future flight
• accessibility

Introduction

In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers provided the first public demonstration of a new technology which would later become known as the hot air balloon and, in so doing, led the world into the first age of human flight. In December 1903, the Wright brothers propelled society into a second age of flight by undertaking the world’s first documented, heavier-than-air powered and crewed flights. Despite these defining moments in aeronautical history and human achievement - which have radically changed human mobilities and shaped international trade, global geopolitics, personal leisure travel, and our individual sense of self – the presence of persons with disabilities and their experiences within these histories remain noticeably absent. Although aviation history is replete with lots of ‘firsts’ – including the details of pioneering aviators and flights – the dates when the world’s first wheelchair user or person with MS flew are missing and a diverse community of disabled travellers are seemingly absent from conventional historiographies of passenger flight.

This is, perhaps, unsurprising. Despite over a century of commercial passenger flight, air travel remains one of the most challenging transport modes for persons with disabilities (Wood 2022). Indeed, the current landscape of aviation and disability is replete with accounts of damage, harm, and exclusion as persons with disabilities attempt to gain equitable access to air travel (Disability Rights UK 2022), but find they are disabled by environmental and societal barriers (Shakespeare 2006). These include architectures, vehicle designs, systems and technologies that are not adaptable or able to facilitate their mobility. However, there is potential for change. The UK Government claim that society is facing a defining moment - something they are terming ‘the third aviation revolution’ which will transform future experiences of flight thanks to emerging new technologies. The aim of this think piece is to consider the extent to which Future Flight may represent an opportunity for more accessible aviation. To achieve this, a brief review of the disabling infrastructures of contemporary air travel is presented before the potential opportunities of Future Flight are discussed and possible barriers to change identified. The piece concludes with recommendations for making future air travel more inclusive.

Contemporary air travel – A disabling mode of flight

There is growing recognition that the physical mobility and travel experiences of disabled air passengers is affected not only by the design and built environment of airport terminal buildings, the airport-aircraft interface, and the configuration of aircraft cabins but also by the attitudes of customer-facing staff, the operational practices of airports and airlines, and the regulatory regimes of global air travel (Graham et al. 2019; Budd and Ison 2020). These physical, behavioural and institutional factors have individually and collectively created an environment of immobility for growing numbers of people which effectively prevents, or severely impacts upon, their ability to access conventional air travel and/or their experiences of it (Davies and Christie 2017). Accessibility, in the context of air transport, comprises four distinct components, all of which can pose challenges to passengers with disabilities or additional requirements:.

1. Access to, and egress from, airports, airport terminal buildings and proximate ground access stations and facilities, including railway platforms, subways, public service buses, taxis, car parks and drop off zones;

2. Wayfinding and navigating within an airport terminal, including negotiating security checks, immigration and baggage reclaim, and accessing toilets and food and beverage outlets;

3. Access to digital systems and self-service kiosks in the terminal (many of which are based on touch-screen technologies);

4. Access to, and egress from, aircraft and other mobile assets.

The scale of the issue

Worldwide, one billion people, or 15% of the global population, have a disability (World Bank 2022) and represent the world’s largest minority group (WHO (World Health Organisation) 2011). In the UK alone, 14.6 million people, or 22% of the population, experience some form of impairment (Kirk-Wade 2022). Although equality of access to transport is a fundamental human right, enshrined in Article 9 of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN (United Nations) 2007), EC Regulation 1107/2006 and the 2010 UK Equality Act, travelling by air can be challenging for people with disabilities on account of both physical and socio-cultural impairments. Alongside legal requirements and moral imperatives to provide equal access to air travel, improving passenger accessibility also has commercial advantages for air transport operators. A 2019 survey reported that 46% of UK respondents said that their impairment had restricted their ability to fly (Baker 2020), indicating that people with disabilities would fly more regularly if current physical, organisational, and logistical barriers were addressed. A key challenge for air transport service providers is meeting the requirements of disabled passengers, which includes (but of course is not in any way limited to) older people, people with physical impairments, sensory impairments or non-visible disabilities, within the confines of legacy aircraft and airport assets. An inability to meet these requirements presents a frequent source of service failure and complaint (Ancell and Graham 2016).

During the last 20 years, several interventions – both regulatory and architectural – have been introduced in certain countries and supranational jurisdictions, including the European Union, to try and promote accessibility for people whose personal autonomy and mobility can be disabled by inaccessible infrastructure or poor customer service. In the context of both public transport and air travel specifically, these were initially largely related to physical accessibility challenges and the presence (or absence) of step free environments and the provision of wheelchair accessible spaces. However, more recent research has begun to explore the myriad of other air passenger needs, including those relating to neurodiversity, autism and dementia (on which see Peterson et al. 2024; Pfeiffer, Bower, and Rumrill 2023) and propose recommendations for policy and practice.

Improving access to air travel is not only an important way to enhance social inclusion and equity but also a growing and important market for air transport providers. In the calendar year 2022, 3.45 million special assistance requests (representing 1.56% of all passengers) were received at UK airports and demand for such services has grown, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic (CAA (Civil Aviation Authority)), 2023). The nature of these requests and the level of assistance provided varied considerably. The majority (88%) of assistance requests were (often older) passengers who needed general assistance but did not have more specific requirements; 6% were for people with more specific physical support requirements (often involving wheelchairs and other assistive mobility aids) and the final 6% were for people who were blind, deaf or had another non-visible disability (CAA (Civil Aviation Authority)), 2023).

Although improvements in service quality for disabled passengers have been recorded at some airports, multiple physical/infrastructural, service and communication barriers to accessible and inclusive air travel remain, and ­disabled travellers continue to exhibit a lower propensity to fly than other citizens (Clery et al. 2017; Gordijn 2019). The reasons for this are well known, and, as Pfeiffer, Bower, and Rumrill (2023: 4) note the main concerns of air passengers with disabilities ‘have not changed in the last 25 years’, despite the introduction of dedicated legislation in the European Union and other countries which is designed to ensure equity of access (Budd and Ison 2020). However, despite such interventions and the provision of specialist ground support vehicles (including ambulifts to enable wheelchair users to access and egress aircraft), the majority of the world’s airports and commercial ­aircraft continue to disable large numbers of potential travellers. Until fundamental changes are made to the physical design and service environment of air travel there is little prospect of transformative change.

Future Flight – Accessible for all?

One such opportunity is potentially presented through what the UK Government is calling the ‘third aviation revolution’. A £300 million programme, jointly funded by the UK Government and industry, seeks to develop emerging aeronautical technologies, including (but not limited to) passenger carrying eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft), urban vertiports (airports for VTOLs) and automated delivery drones. This ‘Future Flight’ programme aspires, in part, to create increasingly automated, personalised, environmentally more sustainable, and demand responsive air travel (UKRI (United Kingdom Research and Innovation) 2021: 3).

Clearly, Future Flight will need significant investment and planning in order to realise and then maximise its predicted social opportunities and market potential. As well as seeking to address some of aviation’s negative environmental externalities, Future Flight technologies offer an opportunity to transform the mobility options and travel experiences of disabled travellers by designing out the accessibility issues of legacy aircraft technologies and airport infrastructure and establishing a new regulatory landscape that embeds and ensures accessibility. However, the social opportunities and market potential of these new technologies and systems can only be realised if they are accessible and inclusive and are planned, designed and operated in a way that meets the requirements of disabled travellers and creates inclusive rather than exclusionary spaces of flight.

Detailed consultation and engagement with disabled passengers are essential in order to ensure their requirements are understood and embedded within the development and design of Future Flight products, services, and regulations. Such work will give voice to persons with disabilities and those who travel with them and foreground their requirements into the design and development of future aviation policy and practice. Failure to do this and take full advantage of the opportunity presented by Future Flight will risk perpetuating the same barriers that have been described, debated, but not adequately addressed, during the first century of human flight into the second.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. We appreciate the insightful review comments we received on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).