Her 'moment of panic' went viral. She hopes it helps others in her situation.

Being carried down a set of air stairs in a wheelchair is really not the Instagram post most users want to go viral, but for Tori Lacey, that’s what happened.

Lacey was traveling from her home in Toronto to Liberia, Costa Rica, with her family for a wedding on May 4. When she got there, she realized there was going to be an issue.

Lacey has spinal muscular atrophy, a neuromuscular disorder that severely limits her muscle control. She relies on a custom-made power wheelchair to get around and properly support her body. She needs wheelchairs to navigate the airport.

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Normally, she said, flying is inconvenient but not necessarily dangerous, because her previous flights have all made use of jet bridges, which help make it easier for wheelchairs to get on and off the plane. But in Liberia, Lacey said, her plane parked at a hardstand and was unloaded via stairs.

“It was definitely a moment of panic being like, there’s stairs, what are we going to do?” she told USA TODAY.

A video Lacey posted to Instagram shows her being offloaded from the plane by a crew of airport workers, carrying her down the stairs in an aisle chair that she said wasn’t in a state of good repair. An aisle chair is a narrow wheelchair designed for use in an airplane aisle.

“I immediately see that the aisle chair is broken. The armrests are just hanging, they’re not attached to the chair, they’re just completely broken, and there’s a wheel that’s busted off the front,” she said. “When I get into the chair, the straps, most of them are completely busted up and don’t actually close, but the two that were working wouldn’t tighten enough around my body to secure me in the chair.”

Her father had to reach over and support her head as she was carried off the plane.

Lacey, who blogs under the name Tori Hunter, said she’s equally frustrated for the airport workers as she was for herself.

“This was just as unsafe for the crew as it was for me,” she said. “They should not have been put in a position to have to carry me down all these steps when there were much safer alternatives available at this airport.”

Liberia Airport does have some jet bridges, but it’s possible the airline Lacey was flying, Air Canada Rouge, does not have access to them.

Gates with jet bridges are usually more expensive to access than hardstands that require stairs to deplane, and as Air Canada’s low-cost subsidiary, it’s possible that the agreement with the airport for Rouge flights restricts those planes to only hardstand gates.

Air Canada did not confirm the specifics of their agreement with the airport, but it said in a statement to USA TODAY that it was aware of the incident.

“For both the arrival and departure for her trip, the Costa Rica airport was not able to make an aircraft bridge available, requiring us to use an alternative method of having customers get on and off the plane using air stairs,” the statement said. “We have procedures for customers with disabilities to safely embark and disembark aircraft in such cases, and in this instance all protocols were followed.”

On the return trip, Lacey said, her father just carried her up the stairs himself.

The airline acknowledged that jet bridge boarding and deplaning are always preferable, especially for customers with disabilities. It said it plans to review airport accessibility procedures “with the aim of working with local airports and other partners to find ways to provide more consistent service.”

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At any rate, Lacey said, she doesn’t fault the airline or the airport for what happened but rather said the priorities of the industry as a whole have to change.

“It was never my intention to bring this to Air Canada and tell them that they did something wrong. This is really a systemic issue that comes down to the lack of priority of accessibility across all airlines,” she said. “Accessibility benefits everyone and I think that it really is time for them to realign their priorities.”

Lacey never filed a formal complaint with Air Canada, and has not heard from the airline in the wake of the incident, but she said she hopes her video brings awareness to the airline industry’s accessibility shortcomings.

“Some of the really big jets have full bars in the middle of their aircraft. They can make all that happen, but they can’t make sure that people with disabilities have a safe way to fly,” she said. “That shows me where priorities are.”

In the U.S., disabled travelers also say flying can be extremely inaccessible. USA TODAY profiled more than 30 travelers who rely on mobility devices and who said their aids were damaged over the course of 2023.

Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Viral video shows disabled traveler being carried down airplane stairs