海口 → 西安

May 14, 2021

Three different eras of air traffic control visible in this photo of the Xi'an Airport

I'm sure, if Meilan Airport wanted to make the process of picking up a wheelchair more inconvenient than it currently is, that they have options available to them. For example, they could put it behind a moat patrolled by sharks with head-mounted lasers.

Acquiring wheelchair service at a Chinese airport has never been what you'd call the easiest thing in the world. This is in direct contrast, however, to the god-tier level service you generally get once you have entered the system.

Back when the airport was smaller, there used to be an office; it had a waiting room. There were like twenty chairs available for sitting in and waiting and there was even more than one desk you could sit at to fill out the paperwork to consign yourself or your elderly family member to the airline as a piece of warm and inconveniently shaped luggage.

Should someone tell them that whoever did their lovely frosted glass doesn't know the difference between a lowercase "L" and a capital "I"?

Sure, you had to go find the office. Sure, they still required you to get your boarding pass before you applied for handicap service. But, it was a decently sized space with lots of chairs.

At least for my last two flights, they no longer had this office. Instead, they've moved to a counter in the middle of the row of check in counters. There are three seats for waiting passengers and two chairs for people sitting at the desk filling out paperwork. Every so often someone has to come by and firmly tell the queue that has formed that they're probably standing in the wrong place; this isn't a check in counter.

I may not be as supple as I once was but I'm a particularly young and flexible crip. I've long since found that, when I'm forced to do airport lines, I can swing my leg up and rest it on top of the luggage cart. Not only is it a surprisingly comfortable position, it has the advantage of bringing the scars up to where they are easily visible and where I won't have Nosy Nancies gatekeeping my needing a 'chair.

The craziest rush of early morning departures has ended by the time my 'chair arrives and the Passengers With Special Needs line at Security is only the usual mix of elderly people, families with small children, and flight crew as opposed to a hundred people urgently afraid that they'll miss their flight the way it was on the March flight.

I'm always either the first or the last to board. This time I'm the last. I'm not thrilled about having an aisle seat instead of my preferred bulkhead on the right but, being as I forgot to ask, I'm just grateful that no one is in the middle seat. The fifteen minutes standing in line at Handicapped Services plus only having 4.5 hours sleep last night is enough to make the leg very very cranky and, even though it's been a decade since someone bumping the leg was an issue, I still don't like having people on my right side.

I drowse on the flight. Failed to notice that my flight was direct rather than nonstop and am surprised that we land barely an hour and a half after having taken off. Liuzhou—in Guangxi—is a dual civilian/military airport and it's made very clear that not only must all the window shades be down during our landing but that anyone of any nationality taking any photos or videos of anything outside the terminal risks both fines and detention.

When they decide that the weather delay in Xi'an which is keeping us from taking off again is sufficient for me to be taken off the plane, I get a roughly five minute show of sleek military jets doing the kind of hard landing that requires a parachute pop out. Then, since this airport apparently lacks a Handicapped Lounge, I'm deposited in the Nursing Mothers' Lounge.

At one point while I'm there a staff member who mistakes me for male (boobs being less of a secondary sexual characteristic in China than height or large shoulders) gives me shit about having my leg propped up on one of the tables but, other than that, it's a nice quiet room and a good place for napping.

Back on my flight, I've been moved to the row just behind Business Class and have even more leg room than I started with. An angry passenger in my row berates the steward for our flight delay and the airport's "insufficiently robust notification system". In between thinking that this guy is a jerk, I notice that the steward's parents gave him a great name: his family name 路 means "roads", and his given name 万里 is "an extremely great distance".

More napping on this flight. Meal service that wasn't actually scheduled to happen when I bought my tickets but which has been added because of how long we were delayed.

Then, because the airline which I'm transferring to is a smaller one that never has meal service, because I'll be flying at a time that I might be hungry, and because my mobility limitations will make getting to one of the terminal restaurants inconvenient, the stews give me a bag with a few bottles of water and some packets of crackers to take with me.

It's my first time transferring within China from one airline to another where my luggage wasn't checked through to my destination at the initial airport so I don't know if the counter service I got was special for being handicapped or not.

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