A Japanese airline has apologised to a disabled passenger who was forced to crawl up a set of stairs to board the plane, BBC reported on Thursday. The incident took place at a tiny airport on the resort island of Amami in Japan.

Wheelchair-bound Hideto Kijima had to hoist himself from the runway up to the aircraft door, after Vanilla Air employees did not allow his friends to carry him aboard.

The airline staff told Kijima, who was paralysed from the waist down in a school rugby accident in 1990, that he would not be allowed to board the flight if he could not climb the stairs without assistance. The staff said this was purely for “safety reasons”.

In a blog post, Kijima said he has used some 200 airports in 158 countries, but this was the first time he had been refused help for boarding a flight. Kijima said that he has relied on the help of friends or staff members wherever facilities were not available for mobility disabled passengers. “I just had to ignore them and keep moving up, or I would not have been able to return to Osaka,” Kijima wrote on his blog.

However, the 44-year-old said he had been informed before the flight that the plane was not equipped with lifts to carry passengers with disabilities.

Vanilla Air apologised for the incident and also announced new measures to aid wheelchair users at the airport. “We’re sorry that we caused him that hardship,” a company spokesman was quoted as saying by AFP.