A famous BBC journalist who was partially paralyzed in a gun attack in Saudi Arabia in 2004 says he was forced to drag himself along the aisle of a LOT Polish Airlines plane because the carrier did not have a wheelchair onboard the plane.
Award-winning security correspondent Frank Gardner, 63, was traveling from the Polish capital, Warsaw, to London on Monday when he discovered that the airline doesn’t have facilities to help disabled passengers should they need to use the lavatory during a flight.
“Wow. It’s 2024 and I’ve just had to crawl along the floor of this LOT Polish airline to get to the toilet during a flight back from Warsaw as ‘we don’t have onboard wheelchairs. It’s airline policy’,” Gardener wrote in a post on X.
“If you’re disabled and you can’t walk this is just discriminatory,” Gardner’s post continued.
Gardner had been reporting from a notorious neighbourhood of the Saudi capital Riyadh in June 2004 when gunmen affiliated with al-Qaida opened fire on him and his cameraman.
Gardner was shot six times. One of the bullets hit his spinal nerves, leaving him permanently paralysed. Tragically, his cameraman, Simon Cumbers, was killed in the incident.
Despite his injuries, Gardner returned to work for the BBC just 12 months later and continues to report on global security affairs, including the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
In a follow up post on X, Gardner said: “In fairness to the cabin crew, they were as helpful and apologetic as they could be. Not their fault, it’s the airline. Won’t be flying LOT again until they join the 21st century.”
In 2022, Britain’s civil aviation regulator blasted airlines over what it described as “service failings” towards disabled passengers, saying it was “very concerned” about reports that passengers had been left stranded on planes or had their wheelchairs damaged beyond use.
At the time, Garnder made headlines when he found himself abandoned on a plane at London Heathrow because there was no staff available to get his specialized wheelchair from the hold and bring it to the door of the plane.
Gardner accused Heathrow Airport of treating disabled passengers as “the lowest priority”.
Many airlines have special aisle wheelchairs that can be used to transport disabled passengers from their seats to the onboard lavatory during a flight but this service is not widely advertised and its hard for passengers to know which airlines have these wheelchairs onboard and which ones don’t.
Also, in 2022, Jennie Berry from Hartlepool shared a TikTok of her dragging herself along the aisle of an Alabaster flight because there wasn’t an aisle wheelchair available.
Berry, who is paralyzed from the waist down, claimed a flight attendant even suggested that she should wear a nappy during her travels so as to avoid needing to go to the lavatory on a flight.
Under European regulations that have been in force since 2006, airlines are legally required to provide assistance in moving disabled people to an onboard lavatory if required, although the regulations don’t stipulate the need to have an aisle wheelchair available.
