‘This is like my legs. And I’m sitting there thinking: ‘Oh my God, they’re going to break it,’” says the broadcaster Sophie Morgan after her wheelchair is damaged by airline staff at the start of this searing documentary.
For Morgan, this was a defining moment. Since becoming paralysed as a teenager, the 39-year-old has frequently suffered poor treatment when flying. Within days of her wheelchair being broken, she is on the set of Loose Women to launch the Rights on Flights campaign. It calls for the Civil Aviation Authority to impose fines when an airline fails a disabled customer and, in the long term, for the redesign of aircrafts to enable disabled passengers to stay in their wheelchairs while they fly, as they can on trains.
If this were a documentary aimed solely at disabled viewers, it would be rounded up in 15 minutes flat. No one who has used a wheelchair in public needs to be convinced that transport, especially air, is often shamefully inaccessible. But Morgan knows she doesn’t have the luxury of preaching to the converted. To create change, first she has to convince non-disabled decision-makers that this matters.
“We normalise the discrimination of disabled people,” she says. “The feeling is we’re asking too much.” To prove her point, Morgan holds up her phone to the camera to show a tweet she has just received from an anonymous X user in response to her campaign: “Do you ever shut the fuck up about your disability?”
Luckily for us, she doesn’t. Watching Morgan, it’s almost impossible not to cheer her on from the sofa. She has relentless energy, whether that is turning up to an event at parliament when she is sick or managing to get a selfie with President Biden when visiting Washington DC to hear about new US aviation legislation.
And yet it’s clear that Morgan is relentless because she has to be. During the scenes in which she meets non-disabled executives, you can almost hear the sound of a brick wall being banged. When Morgan shows the accessibility manager at Stansted a clip of a disabled customer being mistreated by staff and asks why such behaviour happens, the silence feels so long that there is a risk it will run into the ad break.
By far the most powerful moments come when the programme turns into a Dispatches-style undercover job. Morgan asks a group of disabled friends and campaigners to fly to European cities via three airlines and airports that have been criticised previously by disabled passengers. What follows is a jaw-dropping, maddening sequence of discrimination and incompetence. Paralysed passengers are shown stuck on a plane after everyone else has left because assistance didn’t turn up. Others are told they can’t board at all because their wheelchairs are too heavy, despite having called ahead and been given approval. Several young women are manhandled out of their wheelchairs by bulky male staff; one is bruised in the process. As I watch yet another mobility aid get smashed by airport staff, I am reminded why I haven’t flown for a holiday in more than 20 years.
This is about practicalities, of course, but much of it is a matter of basic dignity and who is said to deserve it. At one point, we see one of the undercover campaigners, Spencer – who has a spinal-cord injury – ask a flight attendant whether the plane has an aisle chair in order for him to be able to transfer out of his seat to use the bathroom. They don’t. Instead, we – and his fellow passengers – watch as he drags his body along the floor of the plane to get to the toilet.
In the most difficult scene to watch, we see Sulaiman – who has muscular dystrophy – stranded on a plane because a hoist fails to arrive. As the camera pauses over the sight of Sulaiman lying abandoned across three plane seats, the staff talking apologetically over him, the sense of degradation is palpable. That Sulaiman has arrived in Paris, the host of this year’s Paralympic Games, is a bleak irony.
In the final minutes, Morgan gets a glimpse of the freedom she has been craving. Invited for a flight in a zero-gravity plane, she floats through the air unencumbered. I imagine I am meant to be most moved by this scene, but it is actually an earlier one – in which Morgan is shown a prototype for a wheelchair plane seat – that gets me. As Morgan rolls her wheelchair back into the perfectly designed slot, you can practically feel the relief in her. The fix is so simple; almost insultingly so.
You find yourself coming back to the elephant that has been sitting quietly in the corner for the hour: if this problem affected anyone other than disabled customers, would this multibillion-pound industry have solved it decades ago? As one crying passenger says to camera: “We’re treated like luggage, like cattle. And this can’t continue any more.”
• Sophie Morgan’s Fight to Fly aired on Channel 4 and is available online
