Air Canada: 49-year-old disabled man drags himself off plane as airline didn't provide wheelchair

A 49-year-old disabled man was left with no choice but to drag himself to the front of an Air Canada plane to get off after the airline failed to provide a wheelchair for him. The man said that he was left in "significant pain", CBS News reported.

Rodney Hodgins said that he wants the flagship carrier to amend its policy so that when an aircraft lands, someone is always there to assist the person with a disability.

Hodgins uses a motorised wheelchair as he has spastic cerebral palsy, which is a group of disorders that affect a person's ability to move and maintain balance and posture. He apparently had altered his motorised wheelchair to fit in the cargo area in advance of the flight.

However, the flight attendant informed the couple that there was not enough time for them to get a wheelchair on board before the plane had to be made ready for takeoff again after the plane landed, his wife Deanna wrote in a recent Facebook post.

The couple thought the flight assistant was joking when she asked Rodney to pull himself off the plane alone. But he ended up moving past 12 rows of seats, using his upper body strength.

Hodgins is reportedly a hardware salesman from British Columbia. He flew to Las Vegas with his wife to celebrate their anniversary in August. He told CBC News: "It was quite painful for me to do that in the first place. It hurt my legs. For three days I felt terrible on my holiday. I thought, they don't care about me, they just want me to get off this plane."

Deanna said in the post that the incident left them devastated. She said, "It took us struggling, in front of a dozen people as some looked away and others looked on with shame, to get him off that plane."

She added, "He hurt his legs and I hurt my back – emotionally a lot more was hurt … my husband's human rights were trampled on and Air Canada won't respond to us, and never did reach out like they promised. Rod is the most beautiful human on the planet and didn't deserve this at all."

The company acknowledged the pain Rodney Hodgins and his wife suffered as it said, "We use the services of a third-party wheelchair assistance specialist in Las Vegas to provide safe transport on and off aircraft."

"Following our investigation into how this serious service lapse occurred, we will be evaluating other mobility assistance service partners in Las Vegas," it added.

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