Sounds to me as if this issue is being treated, for the purposes of Elf n' Seifty, as black/white - when in fact it's pretty grey - some people really *are* wheelchair-bound, while others are perfectly spry in most situations and have no trouble getting up and down a single flight of steps.

The first problem is that airports are designed not for people but for airplanes, as I was reminded last night when arriving into LHR T1 - I thought I'd walked all the way to Paddington by the time we got to passport control. Ridiculous! If I was tired (and a bit indignant) at that point, of course someone who's 80 years old is going to want a lift from the plane.

The second problem is that the people who have 'designed' the relevant assessments, systems and calculated the risks aren't actually human; I'm not sure what they are, but while they may be 'smart', they don't strike me as really all that intelligent. Otherwise they would realise that this is the case, and devise a system that has more than a simple, binary "this passenger is fully able-bodied / that passenger is basically a complete vegetable" choice.

Strike one up for misdirected ideas about 'managing out' risk, the rise of unthinking managerialism in the workforce, and the creation of systems that force reassessment of the real world into unrealistic pigeonholes. <sigh>