Pursuant to direction from the ICAO Assembly, the Tenth Session of the Facilitation Division (FAL/10) introduced a number of Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs) in Annex 9 concerning the access to air services and airport facilities by elderly and disabled persons. FAL/11 built upon this work by introducing new SARPs to reflect additional concepts, including:
- the opportunity for wheelchair users to use their own wheelchairs to move to and from the aircraft;
- the establishment and coordination of training programmes for personnel handling elderly and disabled persons;
- uniformity of criteria for accessibility of air transport by persons with reduced mobility;
- accessibility of all the elements of the chain of a journey by a person with reduced mobility;
- practices relating to special equipment in aircraft, allocation of seats, type of lighting in aircraft, the use of wheelchairs on board;
- the introduction of special provisions relating to evacuation procedures;
- accommodation of service animals in aircraft cabins; and
- the need for a strategy to harmonize air transportation regulations and Recommended Practices encouraging the treatment of persons with disabilities with dignity and consideration.
The Division also recommended that ICAO adopt the term "persons with disabilities" to denote people requiring special assistance. The following definition is now included in the Tenth Edition of Annex 9.
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Person with disabilities. Any person whose mobility is reduced due to a physical
incapacity (sensory or locomotor), an intellectual deficiency, age, illness or an other cause of
disability when using transport and whose situation needs special attention and the adaptation to
the person's needs of the services made available to all passengers.
