Small Aircraft Boarding for Passengers with Mobility Impairments in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than 70 percent of all scheduled air service in Canada involves the use of small aircraft on one or more legs. Small aircraft, with 19 - 60 seats, make boarding, seating, and storage of mobility aids difficult for people with mobility impairments. Without innovative technologies, procedures, and policies, such difficulties can become barriers, especially for passengers using wheelchairs. Although some technologies and procedures are currently in use, there are no national guidelines to help carriers provide consistent access to small aircraft for passengers using wheelchairs. This paper discusses the development of a unique database to establish a basis for a Code of Practice for Canadian air carriers. The following essential components for the database will be investigated and established: (1) small aircraft types used by carriers; (2)airport class/size and routes; (3) boarding devices to lift passengers in wheelchairs from tarmac to aircraft door level; (4) boarding procedures and protocols used by carriers and airports; (5) compatibility between aircraft type, boarding device and boarding protocol; and (6) cost-effectiveness analysis for boarding devices and protocols. Survey instruments were designed to carry out a national survey targeting: (1) air carriers using small aircraft in their scheduled service; (2) airports used by small aircraft; and (3) manufacturers of boarding devices. The results will be used to develop a software program with several menus: (1) aircraft type and route allocation, indicating for each aircraft type its seating capacity, storage capability for wheelchairs, and accessible seating; (2) boarding device specifications, divided into terminal-based, mechanized tarmac- based, and aircraft-based equipment. Sub menus will include supplier details, engineering specs, capital and life-cycle costs, and compatibility with aircraft type; (3) boarding procedures/protocol (with details of compatibility with aircraft type), boarding equipment, and procedure costs. Chair transfers in terminals, at boarding devices, and in aircraft will be identified according to protocol and logistics; (4) compatibility and life-cycle cost menu featuring, for example, the cost and effectiveness of the required technology for a selected aircraft, along with the appropriate boarding procedure; and (5) current practice versus best practice will reveal details for compatible technologies, with boarding procedures, ranked by cost-effectiveness, and the percentage of passenger movements/airport. A recommended Code of Practice will be developed based on a detailed baseline of current practice by aircraft type and the identification of “best practice” improvements, also by aircraft type, that are cost-effective and state-of-the-art. Where incompatibilities exist, corresponding research and development gaps will be identified, e.g., integrated on-board boarding devices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".