Tanni’s View

YET AGAINthere have been stories in the media about disabled people having a really poor experience of flying. What has at times appeared to be one off stories in the press, the poor level of performance has been confirmed by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). Their recently published interim airport accessibility report listed a number of British airports that needed to do better, but also criticised Heathrow Airport. The report states that many passengers missed flights, but did not give a number

The latest example is of eight-year-old Tony Hudgell, a double amputee who had been on holiday with his family. His wheelchair, when it was eventually returned, was damaged

When I was an athlete flying was always a nervous thing to do. Worrying that my racing chair might not arrive was only equalled by the worry that it might be damaged and impossible to repair. My day chair was only occasionally lost or damaged, but the one time it went missing it was really bad. The airline originally tried to say that the item that I was missing was a sleeping bag. They arrived with it at my house and tried to hand it over even though it had a tag on it with someone else’s name and going to a different destination. My chair came back several months later cut in half. The person who delivered this back to me actually asked if I could fix it by using some duct tape. Now duct tape is incredible but I am not sure that it was going to fix my day chair.

Tony Hudgell’s chair was apparently put on the conveyor belt and that was also a massive

Baroness Grey-Thompson DBE writes for Ability Needs

fear that my chair would come out this way rather than through oversize baggage. And it has been reported that this year several athletes missed the Peachtree 10km road race because their chairs didn’t arrive. World number 1 Marcel Hug was one of the athletes to be affected. The race is in Atlanta, home to Hartsfield-Jackson airport, which is the biggest airport in the world. This should not be an excuse. On the back of Covid there are challenges, and I am told that it has not been easy to get staff. However, it does appear to be worse than it used to be or perhaps it is more that there are more stories in the press than there used to be. Social media has undoubtedly helped get the stories out there.

It is easy to list all the problems, but much harder to find solutions. A number of airports were listed as very good, which is good to know. One of them, London City, is one that I would choose to fly from if I could. It is not a big airport so there isn’t a long way to walk. The downside is that there is not much to ‘do’ there if a flight is delayed, but I have always been boarded in a timely way and never really had to wait to get off.

There is a really good blog online by Rebekah Taussig about what it is like to fly as a disabled person, but also flying with her child. How hard it can be to fly with a toddler but then the relief when she gets off and her wheelchair is there.

We have come around again to looking at whether there should be an option of disabled people flying in their own wheelchairs. This is not something that I would wish to do because my chair is not set up in a way that would make it work, but I can see why people would want to. I can’t see this happening anytime soon as if they can’t get it right for people in a manual chair to fly, I don’t see how they can get anything else to work. That doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t try to make it happen. I at least hope that the airports take this latest report seriously and take meaningful action.

In researching for this article, I somehow managed to get on to disaster planning from around the world (the internet is a marvellous thing) and found many articles saying that disabled people are ignored. The UN have some interesting articles about how disabled people are treated in humanitarian contexts. It is not happy reading, but it is insightful and gives some interesting context about the value that is placed on disabled people. That debate is for another time.

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