‘It’s like having your legs broken’: The truth about flying as a disabled traveller
Lost and broken wheelchairs; getting stranded on planes for hours; being ‘dropped’ by cabin crew supposedly in charge of their safety: the litany of indignities and injustices endured by disabled passengers is endless. TV presenter Sophie Morgan tells Helen Coffey why the aviation industry is so desperately in need of an upgrade
Sophie Morgan is angry and she doesn’t care who knows it. “It’s completely and utterly disabling. Infuriating. Ridiculous. Unfair. Awful. And, for me, enraging.”
The 38-year-old TV presenter and disability advocate is describing the moment she discovered her wheelchair was broken after a flight – something that has happened to her not once, but twice, in the past six months alone. It is hard, perhaps, for a non-disabled traveller to grasp the true gravity of being reunited with the device upon which your mobility entirely depends, only to find it no longer works. But Sophie paints a vivid picture.
“Imagine what it’s like to have your legs broken – that will give you an idea,” she tells The Independent. “It’s like that. There aren’t many words to put to it.”
Paraplegic since the age of 18 when a car crash resulted in a spinal injury, Sophie has had more experience than most when it comes to the pitfalls of travelling as a wheelchair user. That’s because she’s far more well-travelled than most; in fact, the Paralympics, Dispatches, documentary and Loose Women presenter is far more well-travelled than me, an actual travel editor. My head spins as she reels off her destinations so far in 2023: “California, New York, Texas, Malibu, the Dominican Republic, France...”
She’s currently in South Africa, speaking to me from the world’s first fully accessible five-star safari lodge – “it’s incredible” – before future trips will take her to Washington, Chile, back to California, Morocco and finally Canada. When pressed on how many destinations she’ll have visited this year in total, there’s a long pause while some arduous adding up is undertaken. “Eight as we speak – this year altogether it will be 14 places!”, comes the eventual reply.
Whether for work or play, Sophie loves travelling for the same reasons most of us do: “The opportunity to see different places and meet different people. I love to live a diverse life; I constantly want to be learning.”
But while her job takes her to some of the most accessible destinations in the world, and while many elements of travel in general seem to be getting better for disabled people, there is one huge obstacle that has shown little sign of improving in recent years.
“Flying is a barrier; it often makes the experience just a little bit less enjoyable,” Sophie says. “Travel is often disrupted – it’s not often seamless. It’s not often the same experience as if you were non-disabled. That paints a picture.”
Can you imagine if an airline broke your legs and told you that you had to complain to them? It’s not right
For context, having a wheelchair damaged in transit is far, far more than a mere inconvenience. It is in no way comparable to, say, an airline losing your luggage; it is completely debilitating. This is, in part, because getting a chair fixed or replaced is both an incredibly lengthy and eye-wateringly expensive process.
“Wheelchairs are bespoke, so you can’t just get them off the shelf,” says Sophie. “You can’t get them replaced in a hurry and the cost is considerable. The average manual wheelchair can cost anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds. My chair specifically, in total, costs around £8,000. It’s a lot of money. And you cannot replace them overnight; you can’t even replace them within six months. It takes absolutely ages.”
Sophie is currently using a replacement chair while a new one is made for her, after her original wheelchair and its attachment were so badly mishandled by BA in January that both elements were completely written off.
She’s far from the only disabled passenger to have been impacted by inadequate service levels while flying. In the last year alone, The Independent has reported on dozens of stories concerning airlines breaking travellers’ wheelchairs or generally mistreating disabled customers.
In June last year, a man shared footage of the damage caused to his son’s £11,000 wheelchair during an easyJet flight from Milan to Lisbon. Barnabe Freixo claimed luggage handlers – who he had shown how to safely store the chair at Milan Malpensa Airport before boarding – had attempted to take the wheels off, breaking the electrical connectors that made the chair move. He and his 10-year-old son, Zorion, who suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, were “distraught” at finding the bespoke chair rendered unusable.
Then, in August, disability rights advocate Niamh Ní Hoireabhaird accused Ryanair of breaking her electric wheelchair during a journey from Dublin to Amsterdam, saying her “worst fear came true” when the device she relied on was found to be damaged after the flight. Just a week later, a passenger on an Air Canada flight shared her outrage after her wheelchair was also destroyed during a flight. Maayan Ziv said she felt as if “disabled passengers aren’t seen”.
“We’re treated like luggage, like cattle, and this can’t continue anymore,” she said in an emotional video posted on her Instagram page.
We’re treated like luggage, like cattle, and this can’t continue anymore
As recently as May 2023, a woman’s video went viral after she detailed her experience on board a United Airlines flight on social media. Tiktok user karleexrosee called out the airline, alleging that crew nearly broke her wheelchair in a “rushed” boarding debacle and saying: “These are literally my legs.”
Meanwhile, Icelandic Twitter user Halli (famed for his excellent online sparring match with Elon Musk) earlier this month shared a shocking experience that occurred on a Delta flight: “A Delta employee changed a safety feature on my wheelchair without telling me, causing me to fall head-first on my back. Luckily there was nothing behind me, if there had been I could have been very seriously hurt. Funnily enough the guy was in charge of my safety.”
In an emotive thread, he went on to highlight the multiple horror stories he has been subject to while travelling: “My wheelchair has been lost. I have been dropped multiple times. My arms and legs twisted. Disabled people should not need to fear for their safety when they travel.”
It’s a barrier that Sophie is all too familiar with. “More and more disabled people are choosing not to fly and that’s a really sad consequence of this whole problem,” she says. “The airline industry’s pace of change is glacial, whereas the fear that’s rife amongst the community is really crippling. Disabled people just don’t want to fly; and that’s awful.”
After BA broke her wheelchair the first time in January, it sparked Sophie to launch the Rights on Flights campaign – along with other passionate advocates including MP Marion Fellows, a spokesperson for disabilities for the SNP – to lobby for changes to make air travel more accessible.
One pressing issue is compensation: unbelievably, airlines in the UK aren’t currently legally obliged to pay the full compensation cost of replacing a passenger’s wheelchair when they break it. Rights on Flights is demanding this compensation “cap” be lifted, so that travellers receive the price in full of getting a new chair made when it is irreversibly damaged in transit.
Another priority is accountability. When things do go wrong on a flight, disabled travellers have two options. They can go straight to the airline and complain, which in itself is a lengthy, frustrating process without guaranteed success (Sophie describes this as “really unfair” on the disabled person – “Can you imagine if an airline broke your legs and told you that you had to complain to them? It’s not right”). The other option is to try to get the regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), to step in and support you; but, right now, it doesn’t have the teeth needed when it comes to forcing carriers to do the right thing.
“You’re kind of stuck,” says Sophie. “Hence why this campaign is important.” The first goal of Rights on Flights was to push the government to give the CAA more powers, including imposing fines on airlines whenever they let down disabled passengers – whether it’s leaving them on board the aircraft for too long, losing or breaking their equipment, or not providing the right assistance.
Sophie et al campaigned for a month, gathering politicians’ signatures and doing the media rounds, before delivering a letter to Parliament demanding these specific changes. On 27 June, the UK government published a report outlining proposed changes to aviation legislation, which included updated guidance and measures designed to protect disabled flyers; the removal of the current cap on compensation when equipment gets damaged by airlines; and stronger enforcement powers to the CAA when airlines or airports treat disabled passengers unfairly.
It was a “watershed moment”, according to Sophie – but now isn’t the time to get complacent. “Rights on Flights will be holding them to account on the changes they’ve promised to make. Whether we will see that soon or whether it will get lost we don’t know – we’re just going to make sure we do everything in our power to keep the pressure on to make sure that the changes they’re suggesting actually get implemented.”
Elsewhere, the campaign is working with the aviation industry to see what can be done to expedite revolutionary solutions that already exist, such as the Air4All system – a first-of-its-kind design that would enable disabled travellers to sit in their own wheelchairs during a flight, thereby completely bypassing the drama of chairs getting lost or broken in transit. Sophie is pushing for regulators to remove the red tape around getting the system onto planes, and joining calls for aircraft design to be overhauled so that disabled people aren’t descriminated against.
There’s no other form of transport that treats disabled people so unjustly
“We want to try to encourage and empower disabled flyers,” she says. “But while for some flying is difficult, and many are choosing not to, for some, flying is actually impossible at the moment. You cannot fly with certain disabilities. The way the aircraft is designed designs out some disabled people.
“It is highly discriminative. It is highly unjust. There’s no other form of transport that treats disabled people so unjustly; we’re technically banning wheelchairs on aeroplanes. It’s really bad. We want to change that. We want to change it for those who can’t fly and make it easier for those who can.”
Like I said, Sophie Morgan is angry. But anger can often be the most potent fuel for change; and change is vital if we want a travel industry that treats every traveller with equal dignity and respect.
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