A reference for wheelchair users who fly
Your chair is not luggage.
Airlines keep treating it like luggage.
wheelair is the wheelchair and mobility-aid policy of the world’s airlines, gathered in one place, quoted from the airline’s own page, linked to that page, and stamped with the date it was read. Where an airline publishes nothing, it says so instead of guessing.
Why this exists
A power chair is a custom-fitted medical device that costs as much as a car and takes months to replace. Every flight asks its owner to hand it to a stranger, watch it disappear into a hold, and hope. When it comes back broken, the trip is over and so, often, is the ability to leave the house.
The information that would prevent most of this already exists. It is simply unfindable. The battery rule is on the dangerous-goods page. The size limit is on a baggage page, if it is published at all. The notice period is on the accessibility page and contradicts the one in the conditions of carriage. Half of it is in a language the traveller does not read, and a third of it sits behind a bot wall that only renders in a real browser.
So people ask in forums, and get answers that are years out of date, or about a different airline, or simply wrong. A wrong number here is worse than no number — it is the difference between boarding and being left at a gate in a country you cannot get home from.
What is in here
- 372airlines covered, from IATA’s member list
- 340of the 340 that carry passengers, read and recorded
- 2364citations, each with the date it was read
- 2192assistance phone numbers, emails and forms
And the uncomfortable findings, which are the point: 19 airlines publish nothing at all about carrying a passenger’s own wheelchair. 3 refuse powered chairs outright. 297 of 340 never publish a maximum chair size, so the only honest answer to “will it fit?” is a phone call. See the gaps in full.
Three ways to use it
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Will my chair fit?
Pick the airline you are flying, enter your chair once, and get a plain answer about that airline — what its published limits actually say, and what it has never said.
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Which aircraft is the problem
Chairs are refused by cargo-hold doors, not by airlines. A regional jet door can be 30 cm narrower than a widebody. Check the type you are actually booked on.
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The rules behind the rules
What ICAO and IATA say about your battery, and what the law in the US, Europe and Canada obliges the airline to do for you. Useful at a check-in desk.
How to know whether to trust a page here
One rule governs the whole dataset: a fact is either traced to the airline’s own page, or it is blank. There is no third option. No inference, no “industry standard”, no filling in the usual 300 Wh because it is probably right.
So a blank does not mean nobody looked. It means the airline does not say, and the honest answer is that you have to ask them. Every figure carries a link to the page it came from and the date it was read, because these pages change without notice and a year-old policy quietly presented as current is the worst thing this reference could do to you.