I flew to Rhodes recently. The holiday was great, thanks for asking. We went back to the same hotel in the same resort we had been to in 2015, the Atrium Platinum in Ixia. It is a stunning place with a luxurious pool area, resplendent with its bridges which lead to the pool bar. If you don’t fancy that, and to be fair if you are a wheelchair user by yourself you might not because those bridges are pretty steep affairs, you can download the free app on your phone which allows you to order food and drink to be brought to your lounger. I didn’t move very far during the week.
Alas this is not a story about beautiful hotels in sun-baked locations off the coast of Greece. It is about the tragic and yet somehow predictable incompetence of Manchester Airport. There were no problems on the way out. We were met quickly after we landed, with the wheelchair at the door. To be fair to all airports in including the woeful and aforementioned Manchester, largely gone are the days when my wheelchair would be sent down to the carousel as if it were a piece of baggage no more important than Emma’s hair straighteners.
Despite the obvious advantage of having no language barrier to break down the staff at Manchester could not replicate the efficiency of their Greek counterparts and so things did not go quite so smoothly on the way back home. A four-hour flight that had already been delayed by around 75 minutes because of some vague explanation about air traffic control became an ordeal something closer to six hours. First there was the wait for the plane to take off because of the delay, but that had nothing on the wait to get off the plane as the bumbling staff at Manchester Airport fell over each other to blame everyone else but themselves for their failure to assist me. We landed at about 4.10 in the afternoon UK time, the plane having been originally scheduled for around 10.30am UK time but not leaving until around 11.45.
You can’t take a wheelchair with you on board an aeroplane. It has to go into the hold and so effectively is treated as luggage. Still, in 2019. Planes aren’t big enough particularly this flying 10A that we were on. We are probably decades away from ever having planes that are big enough to accommodate passengers remaining in their wheelchairs. There is no appetite for spending the money it would require to make the aeroplane door oh…..eight inches wider at either side or to widen the aisles by a similar distance. And then where do you store it while the flight is in progress? You wouldn’t want to remain in the wheelchair if your mobility is such that it prevents you from climbing steps but not from transferring on to a regular plane seat. It cannot be beyond the wit of man on the 50th anniversary of landing a man on the moon but currently this is the situation. So you have to wait for assistance to board and to disembark.
This is where our problems started. At first there was nothing, just some good natured banter between ourselves and the cabin crew about what a bind it is to have to wait until everyone else has got off the plane before we can think about leaving it. Some time passed and then the apologies started. Various members of the crew came to say how sorry they were that it was taking so long for my wheelchair to be brought to the door of the plane. They were definitely on their way and wouldn’t be long.
It wasn’t until the crew starting cleaning the plane that I started to really worry that this mythical assistance might not be arriving. Several of them were scurrying around us picking up empty food packets, cups, sweet wrappers and anything else left behind by a couple of hundred tired holidaymakers trying to while away a few hours in as pleasurable a manner as possible before reaching home. One crew member told us that they have around 90 minutes between landing and the time when the next set of passengers start to board for the next flight. It was more than possible that we could have been on our way to Palma in Majorca, which I know from past experience is lovely this time of year but not quite what we’d paid for.
More apologies followed and the blame game continued. Apparently it is not the responsibility of Jet2 or any other airline you might fly with to assist wheelchair users on and off aeroplanes. That is the job of a company called OCS, a criminally under-staffed company which played a major role in my last plane-related blog about Matt Byrne being refused assistance to board a flight to Nottingham from Dublin recently. Jet2 claim that they have asked whether they can take responsibility themselves, that they are willing to pay their own staff to make sure wheelchair users receive more timely assistance, but that their request has been turned down. Of course if airlines start doing crazy things like actually making sure that their wheelchair-using passengers can get off the plane before it takes off again then what little staff they do have at OCS will find themselves out of a job.
Over one hour passed before a beleaguered pair of OCS staff arrived to do their aisle chair thing. Basically their ‘assistance’ consists of strapping me to an aisle chair and physically lugging me backwards (or forwards depending on which direction takes us to the nearest exit) down the aisle and towards the door where my wheelchair waits in the ambulift. It’s not very sophisticated and if you are concerned for your dignity as a wheelchair user then flying is probably not for you. The shame of it all is that it takes over an hour to arrange this. They know the flight schedules so it is not as if wheelchair-using passengers are turning up unexpectedly, willy-nilly in a scandalous bid to live their lives with the spontaneity that every bugger else enjoys. Aeroplanes are the one form of transport for which I will conform to the tiresome rules about booking in advance if you are a wheelchair user. I won’t do it on trains. If I want to take a train journey on a whim then I bloody well will. All ‘assistance’ involves there is for one person to provide a tiny, portable ramp to negotiate the one or two steps up to the train from the platform. Quite why they cannot make over-ground trains level access like tube trains and trams is beyond my comprehension.
The tedium of the situation did not end once I was back in my wheelchair on the ambulift. They assigned me another, quite unnecessary assistant at this point, a girl who was probably about 18 but looked no older than Little Jimmy Osmond was when he belted out Long Haired Lover From Liverpool or whatever it was. What was she for? I still don’t know. I was in my chair, there are lifts to the baggage reclaim and anywhere else I needed to go to show documents, empty my bladder or wait for a bus to the car park. She kept following us, making that classic able-bodied person’s mistake of trying to push my chair without bothering to enquire whether I needed help with that or not. Mercifully she didn’t do it again once I had explained that I could do it myself. There are few things about being a wheelchair user that are worse than the fetish that the able bodied population have for putting their hands on you despite the fact that you have thrice politely declined their offer of help. Some people find it very difficult to accept our ability to perform a task that they would find difficult like pushing a wheelchair over the Steve Prescott Bridge.
Manchester Airport has previous for this sort of thing. A report in summer 2018 found that they had been ranked ‘poor’ for their service to disabled passengers. It was the second year running that they had received such a rating and by the looks of things they are very much going for what will probably be an unprecedented hat-trick. Some take the view that it is not important what you are remembered for, only that you are remembered. I have considered the continued failure of Manchester Airport and wondered whether I might just be better off flying from elsewhere in future. If I could guarantee that assistance would arrive quickly after the return flight it might actually be worth driving to a different part of the country to catch a flight. But although Manchester was the only airport in the UK ranked ‘poor’ in 2018 I have no confidence that a similar situation would not arise at Leeds-Bradford, East Midlands, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stanstead, Luton, Newcastle or anywhere else. The obvious alternative is Liverpool but I am not sure they have as much choice in terms of destination and there are some worrying if rather stereotypical horror stories doing the rounds about the wisdom of leaving your car there while you enjoy sunning yourself in wherever it might be.
My health problems might or might not prevent me from taking a foreign holiday next year, which if nothing else will offer some respite from the kind of shenanigans that almost led to my arrival in Palma for a bonus holiday that didn’t have the annual leave for and probably couldn’t afford.
