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When Carlos Gomez’s recent flight from Guadalajara was delayed, he asked a gate attendant why. It wasn’t weather or crew shortages. There were 25 wheelchair passengers holding up boarding.
There were no such delays when Gomez’s flight landed. Most of the same passengers stood up without assistance and bounded off toward the baggage claim.
Social media has credited a divine intervention for this sudden return to mobility. An enigmatic “Jetway Jesus” is curing these passengers by the time they land, and the remarkable recovery acts have been dubbed “miracle flights.”
The flight attendant explained to Gomez that many able-bodied passengers request wheelchairs for “the VIP experience”—an escort down the jetway that lets them skip the lines and gives them first crack at overhead space. Once they realize at the end of the flight that they have to wait for assistance to disembark, the healing begins.
There’s typically no request for proof of a disability–passengers just need to fill out a quick form and off they roll. Sometimes there are up to 50 wheelchairs boarding a plane that seats only 130 passengers, the flight attendant told Gomez.
“It makes an already hectic experience of flying even slower,” said Gomez, adding he sees more wheelchair fraud each time he travels.
But some people are unafraid to get ahead. They boast about how they’ve found the ultimate travel hack and share the trick.
“Bring your grandma to skip the lines,” advised Raphael Miranda in a TikTok video. The 28-year-old ophthalmology technician from New York said he uses his grandmother as a Fast Pass through the airport. “She walks fine,” he said, “but to move quicker we get her on a wheelchair.”
One TikTok user filmed her group wheeling through the airport with the caption: “The time me and my friends used wheelchair assistance so we wouldn’t miss our flight back into the U.S.” Another user who made a similar video wrote: “Life hack: if the airport is real packed and you don’t want to wait in line, act injured and ask for a wheelchair.”
The Jetway Jesus ruse isn’t going over well with other travelers, especially people with disabilities and those who have paid extra for priority boarding. Ano Kashumba, a healthcare worker from Tampa, Fla., was on a flight to Los Angeles in October where around 15 people needed a wheelchair to board and only five of them needed it on the other side. “That’s some good healing right there!” she said.
Some of the wheelchair scammers on her miracle flight were middle-aged, but she did note the brazenness of one young woman next to her who simply got up, grabbed her bag and walked off the plane when they landed. “Totally nonchalant,” she said. “These people have no shame.”
Kashumba, who used to use the wheelchair service herself for a genuine disability, said she could sense other passengers were annoyed because they had to wait longer to board, but that nobody stood up to it. “Using a disability sticker to get ahead is concerning for society,” she said.
Miracle flights are also riling flight crews, who often have to work late because of the delays–and aren’t paid overtime. Janae Porter, a former flight attendant for Air Canada, said there were many instances when the airport was backed up because there weren’t enough wheelchairs. Her co-workers at the departure gate would be running around trying to find them while she would have to explain to customers why there was a delay, which happened on one in every four flights.
Porter once had to wait for an hour with someone who really did need a wheelchair but couldn’t get one because they were all occupied.
“There’s a lot more work that goes on behind the scenes which these people don’t consider when they ask for assistance,” said the 29-year-old living in London, Ontario. “In big airports it can be believable that people need a wheelchair, but in a small Canadian town where it’s only a one-minute walk to the gate, it’s clear people just do it to board first.”
Airlines have reported increases in wheelchair assistance requests at airports, according to the International Air Transport Association, a trade group. Some airlines have condemned the abuse of wheelchair service, but cracking down comes with risks.
There are a variety of disabilities, such as autism and dementia, that aren’t immediately apparent but that make it difficult for passengers to navigate a busy airport without assistance.
Miracle flights have caused particular issues for Southwest Airlines, where the lack of assigned seating creates extra incentive to game the system. The airline recently announced that it would implement assigned seating to combat the preboarding chaos–so no more Mario Karting to the front of the line to save a whole row of seats for your friends.
Porter, the former flight attendant, said she had no choice but to joke about the miracle flights with her co-workers. She said they made a game of guessing how many miraculously healed passengers would walk off at the destination. “You just know which airports are going to be a problem,” she said.
Write to Natasha Dangoor at natasha.dangoor@wsj.com
The quirkier side of life
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Appeared in the December 19, 2025, print edition as 'The Latest Travel Scourge: People Touched by ‘Jetway Jesus’'.
