Sensemaker Daily
As the summer travel season approaches Lucy Webster asks why it so often means broken mobility aids and personal humiliation
Everyone is off the plane, but I am still in my seat, trying to catch someone’s eye. My PA, who provides all my care when I travel, has disappeared in search of my wheelchair, and I am getting increasingly anxious the longer she is gone. Because that means something is wrong.
Eventually she comes back, shaking her head in exasperation. She’s been trying to reattach the motor and battery to my foldable travel chair, but she can’t. Somewhere between where I left it at the plane door in London and where it’s been returned to me in Portugal it’s been bent so out of shape that the pieces won’t fit together again. Which means that, for the whole of my much-looked-forward-to holiday with friends, I am unable to move myself. Instead, I am completely reliant on others. I still enjoy myself – disabled people know how to make the most of things – but every time I go to move and find I can’t, I’m reminded that, for airlines, disabled people are still second-class citizens.
This isn’t the worst-case scenario – a broken travel chair and ruined holiday pale in comparison to what can happen when an airline destroys a highly specialised mobility aid. Indeed, we saw the worst-case scenario play out not so long ago. Prominent disability activist Engracia Figueroa’s wheelchair was so badly damaged in 2021 that she was forced to use a temporary one for months while fighting for United Airlines to replace her $30,000 chair. The temporary chair was so unsuited to her needs that she developed severe pressure sores, which became infected, ultimately leading to her untimely death at the age of 51.
These horrifying events don’t seem to have changed anything. In just the month of August 2022, airlines in the US reported mishandling or damaging more than 800 wheelchairs and other mobility devices. Every single one of these incidents represents a potentially serious health risk to a disabled person. But even when the consequences aren’t medical in nature, each broken wheelchair belongs to someone who cannot work, travel, go out or get out of bed in a safe, independent way. And each story of one person’s ruined trip puts another disabled person off travelling – maybe altogether. The destruction of wheelchairs becomes simply another way to limit disabled people’s lives and the opportunities available to us. And it keeps happening.
The problem is hardly new. But thanks to the campaigning efforts of disabled people, it is finally in the spotlight. When Sophie Morgan, a disabled TV presenter and advocate, had her specially made £8,000 chair and Batec power attachment destroyed on a recent flight from Los Angeles to London, she decided enough was enough.
She had checked the two pieces in separately, but staff had attached them together – incorrectly. This meant that when she got off the long flight – using a deeply uncomfortable and unsuitable airplane aisle chair – her chair and Batec were lying on their side, unusable.
“The only thing to do was physically prize them apart, banging it, crashing it, standing on it,” Morgan says, because in that state she couldn’t even sit in her chair. Getting the two pieces apart caused so much damage that, although the Batec has been swiftly repaired, the frame of the wheelchair is beyond salvation.
“I have to replace the whole thing,” she says, stressing how lucky she feels that she had a back-up wheelchair waiting for her at home. Otherwise, she knows she would have had to use an airport-issued chair, with all the attendant risk of pressure sores and serious health problems. Indeed, because she wasn’t even sure if she would even be able to use her own chair to get home, she found the experience “emotionally distressing” as well as “physically inconvenient”.
“I think that’s why people are scared to fly,” she says. “The risk is not outweighed by the reward … Yes, it might go right. But the fact that it does go so wrong weighs on our mind so much that it makes you terrified to fly, because of the consequences – in the short term, the inconvenience of physical and emotional stress; but the longer term consequences are that you just feel nervous. It’s like you feel like you’re never going to forget that experience; you’re never going to get over it.”
Morgan, like many disabled and non-disabled people, has to fly for work. “I want to be able to say: ‘No, that’s it, I’ve had enough, I’m not doing this again.’ But I can’t. The analogy I keep using is it’s like an abusive relationship. Even though they keep screwing you over, continue abusing you and making you feel like shit and then blaming you for being the inconvenience – making you feel like it’s your fault because you’re the wheelchair user – you just have to keep going back because you’ve got no other choice. You’ve got no other way.”
While her broken wheelchair elicits a strong sense of déjà vu, Morgan does think something feels different this time round: the reaction to her story. Since posting about the incident on her social media channels, Morgan has appeared on the BBC and ITV, been featured in newspapers, and gone on to launch a formal campaign with Disability Rights UK and the SNP MP Marion Fellows. And she’s taken the issue international, teaming up with Canadian activist Maayan Ziv to take the issue of accessible air travel to the influential South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. There is a strong grassroots element too: hundreds of people have used the #RightsOnFlights on Instagram and Twitter to share their own stories of discrimination on airlines – from being unable to access the loo to being left on board for hours after landing to, of course, the ubiquitous tales of broken and destroyed mobility aids. And people are noticing.
