Flying with Oxygen

Flying with supplemental oxygen has always been fraught with difficulties not just for Alphas but also for anyone suffering from respiratory disease.

In the past people in Canada who require oxygen to travel by air have, in many cases, found the exercise confusing, difficult, unreliable, expensive and sometimes downright scary. Detailed planning has been required to insure a seamless supply from home to the airport, during boarding, disembarking and stopovers and from the destination airport to the final destination. Between March 2000 and June 2005 there were twenty-six complaints filed within the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) by or on behalf of people who require oxygen while traveling by air. Twenty-five complaints were against Air Canada and one was against WestJet.

Mark Pettigrew, an Alpha and former member of the board of Alpha-1 Canada has sifted through all the decisions of the CTA, distilled it down to something we can all understand and submitted the information to us. His submission was so detailed and so well done that we decided it warranted its own section on the web site. So…courtesy of Mark here is Alpha-1 Canada’s Flying With Oxygen page. Thanks Mark!