Japanese budget airline forces wheelchair-bound man to crawl onto plane

A file picture of a Vanilla Air Airbus A320.

TOKYO: A Japanese budget airline apologised Wednesday for forcing a wheelchair-bound man to crawl up a set of stairs to board his flight.

Hideto Kijima, 44, was returning last month to Osaka from a vacation in Amami, a small island off southern Japan, when a Vanilla Air employee told him that company safety rules banned anyone from carrying him up the stairs.