Accessibility is an increasing issue for stakeholders across the aviation sector, with airports, airlines and ground handlers all looking to provide a more inclusive service to passengers with additional needs. Improving these services is a task that will never be finished, but can arguably never be perfect either.
How, then, can stakeholders ensure their accessibility strategies are effective? Abra Group – the holding company for airlines GOL, Avianca and Wamos Air – last week appointed strategy head Michael Swiatek to take on the newly created role of chief strategy and accessibility officer.
Swiatek, who is himself blind, speaks exclusively with ARGS about his new appointment at Abra Group and what it will mean for the company’s accessibility strategy moving forward.
Michael, as a legally blind person and Abra Group’s newly appointed chief accessibility officer, how will your own experiences with disability influence the company’s accessibility strategy?
I joined the airline industry in 1992 with United Airlines when I was in my late thirties and I have continued to hold executive roles in aviation working on strategy, planning, financing, networking and partnerships since.
Initially, while I hid my blindness, which isn’t uncommon for people with disabilities, it wasn’t until later in my career around 2005 that I started using a white mobility cane to indicate that I was blind and needed help. But nobody treated me any different.
They hired me and used my skills, and I have changed jobs across continents as an airline executive. But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that finally my boss said to me, ‘Mike, you’re a person with a disability, you’re a strong strategic thinker, this is a huge issue in the industry, why don’t you get involved?’.
And I was super happy to get involved. That’s my journey of blindness and how I find myself in this position as an executive and I think that’s important because there are disability advocates and activists and then there are business-minded commercial people – and I have a foot in each camp, so to speak.
I want to find solutions for the disabled community, but I need to also find solutions that are effective from a commercial perspective for airlines, airports and the transportation network.
This gives me the unique perspective of being able to look at it as a person with a disability, but also as someone to say, ‘If a solution is going to cost $1,000 per use, that is highly cost-ineffective for any company to implement’.
That’s the challenge. The great news is we’re finding low cost, high impact ways to change the world for people with disabilities while they travel.
Given that, in your own words, you have a “foot in each camp”, do you see yourself as having an advantage to providing a unique approach to accessibility at Abra Group because, whilst your own experiences are important, you can look at accessibility strategy at an executive level?
The answer to that question is that I’m just one person with a disability out of 1.3 billion. My personal experiences are not the same as everybody else’s.
But they clearly help, not in the sense of saying, ‘Well, here’s my challenge’, but in looking at the issue of accessibility with empathy and common sense. Half the airlines I know do this.
We have an external committee combined of people with all different types of disability so, yeah, if we’re going to look at an ambulift or new piece of technology, if we’re going to look at changing a process or training, we meet with those external people to get their input. That’s not only true for accessibility but in any business, if you really want to hear from your customers and keep them involved with the design of new products.
Where it has been very successful for Abra Group is to have someone sitting at executive level, sitting on the board of directors, who has direct experience with a disability. That’s where sharing my own personal story can persuade people to say, ‘This is very important, and I can’t believe how poor the service might actually be’, because most people at executive level have never actually used their own service.
Accessibility is a broad problem, and it certainly helps to have people who have the disabilities involved in the thinking, creation and implementation of solutions. And it absolutely helps to have someone with a disability voice their opinion and be a businessperson who can speak both languages simultaneously.
How can airlines ensure they are always improving accessibility given that, because they are often passengers’ first port of call when they have a problem, they probably receive more flak compared to airports or ground handlers?
You’re right that airlines are usually thought of as the first point of contact for passengers’ entire journey, even when airlines have no control over certain aspects of that journey. The design of an airport, for instance, we have no input into.
And in today’s day and age of social media and pocket-sized cameras, clearly there is a case to say that services [in some instances] need to be improved because of brand reputation. No airline wants to have videos of passengers receiving bad service posted online.
Improving accessibility is a societal issue, and we believe we have five tools available to us to correct the situation – and we can make improvements, but perfection is a lofty goal that we cannot guarantee. Working at an airline, I meet people who have never met a blind person before and that seems to be a lack in society – so awareness is our first tool.
Second, we need to train people as well as possible; third, we need to look at where we can change and re-engineer processes to make the journey safer, more efficient and more comfortable; forth, digital technology is probably the biggest explosion where we’re finding ways to help blind, deaf or autistic people, for instance; and our fifth tool is changing the hardware, such as making doorways wider or installing escalators and ramps instead of stairs.
But even ramps are not universally accessible because, as a blind person myself who uses a mobility cane, I prefer stairs. That may sound bewildering, but if you think about it, it’s more difficult for me to find an incline or decline walking on a street than finding the actual curb.
However, I recognise that ramps help many others such as wheelchair users. Trying to find a solution that works for all 1.3 billion disabled people, there’s not always a single solution – and sometimes it’s conflicting.
It is an unyielding problem to solve when you’re talking about putting people inside a metal tube with limited space that flies 500mph at 35,000ft. This is maybe one of the most daunting challenges we have.
How has accessibility improved over time, not just within the airline industry, but aviation as a whole?
If you look at accessibility today compared 20 or 50 years ago, we’ve come a long way. There has been a lot of improvement and I’ve been quoted before for saying I think we’re in a ‘golden age’ for accessibility, not only in terms of awareness, but you can be more open about it now.
Generally, society is also more inclusive to people with disabilities, technology has improved incredibly too, because I can take out my smartphone, be in London Heathrow, call my wife in Miami and she can tell me if I’m standing in front gate B30 or B10.
So, again, I believe we’re making progress. I believe in progress over perfection. There will always be someone who thinks a problem can be solved with a different answer, but with limited capital to spend on this, both at government level and at a company level, we can only do so many things at once – we can’t do everything at the same time.
And, in fact, when it comes to technology a lot of these issues need that network effect because the customer doesn’t want solution A at Gatwick, solution B at Heathrow and solution C at Luton and so on.
