The Department of Transportation announced it is revising the rules around flying with “emotional support” animals, essentially stating they will no longer be considered as service animals, which are required by law to be allowed to fly with passengers on commercial airlines. [DOT announcement here]. [Final Rule here ]. The revised Air Carrier Access Act rules define a service animal as "a dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability," such as a seeing-eye dog for the blind. There has been recent improved awareness of the so-called “hidden” disabilities such as autism, dementia, deafness, and low vision, among others. As reported here previously, the recognition of those hidden disabilities has engendered some excellent progress in such areas as smart glasses for the blind, sensory rooms for passengers with autism, and some common sense procedural training and assistive measures being expanded in the UK, such as signage to less stressful quiet areas, and lanyards for passengers with hidden disabilities as a signal to staff to suggest they might need assistance.
However, in the past, it has been possible to get questionable on-line “certification” of the medical and/or emotional necessity to be accompanied by your “service” pig, pony, peacock, parrot, possum, python, or panda … about 250,000 of them challenging the reasonableness off them just on one major carrier, and in many cases for free rather than as paid cargo. Airlines will have to develop their own policies, including paperwork requirements up to 48 hours before flight time.
That last issue also got my attention in a related area: certification. It’s not yet clear what official documentation might be required for a verifiably trained service animal – for example, could a certification for a “mixed breed” brown dog be passed around among multiple users, or is the ubiquitous TSA photo ID necessary, notarized from a veterinarian within the past 30-60 days, and listing the specific tasks the dog can perform? I am reminded of some long-ago demonstrations during the original development of the ADA showing that the blind could more easily navigate the evacuation of a smoke-filled cabin: true, but his dog would not let him jump onto the slide.
But I digress: Certification. What specific Covid-19 test document is required to board a commercial aircraft? Is there a standard? Issued by whom? To what medical criteria? For what period of time? Validated or certified by what agency with what ID-matching process? What happens if it’s expired before your return trip? Can an airport or airline perform a CV-19 test? Should they accept that liability? Again, which test, to what criteria? Must the subsequent connecting flight(s) accept that ad-hoc certification? If they can’t be certified for any reason, or worse, they test positive at the gate despite a “good” certificate, what’s an airport manager to do? Arrest them? Isolate them? Treat them? Escort them to the taxi stand? Transport them to a medical facility downtown?
Here’s fascinating, and very real recent example: a Russian airline was forced to cancel a flight from Moscow to Zhengzhou, China, after COVID-19 tests of 190 passengers were found to be identical, so passengers were not able to get a ‘health code’ to board” and were stranded in Moscow. The Chinese embassy later discovered that some passengers were able to forge negative coronavirus test results to fly home from Russia.
Therein lies my prediction, both for non-service animals and for positive (or “lost”) CV-19 tests. There is almost certainly going to be an increasing on-line black market for phony certificates for both, potentially very different looking for hundreds of “originators”. They are there, at your airport, Mr. Director – what are you gonna do?
