There isn’t a single jet bridge at Punta Gorda Airport. That’s the telescoping walkway between the airport terminal gate and the actual airplane where you wait your turn to claim your seat.
In earlier days there was a moveable flight of stairs for everyone to walk up and enter the plane; but perhaps only the agile flew. That’s not the case today. So when we departed yesterday, I wondered how the nine passengers in wheelchairs, Earl among them, would get from the tarmac to the plane’s door.
The current version of the flight of stairs is a contraption that resembles a truncated letter ‘Z’ and is called a ramp (for obvious reasons). When it was time to board, the wheelchairs were lined up in a row, each with an attendant whose job it was to push the traveler up the ramp.
Gravity is against this, because the top two sections of the ‘Z’ are very steep. I wondered if the attendants were given free access to a health club to hone their skills, which require getting a running start at each section of the ‘Z’ and pushing at least a couple hundred pounds of dead weight to the next section without faltering. I suspect faltering could result in various problems, including attendant termination.
We were the second to last wheelchair to run this gauntlet, and it was an amazing show of what the human body is capable of. It didn’t matter the size of the traveler (and Earl was on the thin side) or the size of the luggage in the traveler’s lap or the size of the attendant. Everyone made it on the first try.
Next all the able-bodied passengers wound their way up the ‘Z’ on their own power. It wasn’t half as interesting.
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