If you’re off abroad in the coming weeks, what will you think about first? Checking in online? When to arrive at the airport? Whether to pay to select a seat?
What you might not be concerned with is making sure not to eat or drink a single thing before flying so you don’t have to drag yourself along the plane floor to the loo, or not being allowed to board at all.
For Sophie Morgan, these are real fears. The television presenter, 39, is the driving force behind a campaign called Rights on Flights, which is calling on the UK government and aviation industry to make flying safe and accessible for the 16 million disabled people in the UK. To that end, she has made a documentary for Channel 4, in conjunction with Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine, in which she sent a group of disabled friends and activists undercover on flights from the UK to various European cities including Paris, soon-to-be host of the Paralympics, and asked them to record their experiences.
“Planes are the one form of transport where you can’t travel in your own wheelchair,” Morgan says. “From the minute we board, we have our mobility devices forcibly removed from us. You are completely dependent on a total stranger and whatever ‘training’ they may or may not have in how to move your body around. It’s terrifying.”
Watch the trailer for Sophie Morgan’s Fight to Fly
It makes for tough watching. One man isn’t placed properly in a small aisle chair — used as standard to wheel disabled flyers to their seats — so his fragile hips are bashed on every armrest. A young woman disembarks to find her expensive wheelchair has been broken through rough handling. A man has to crawl along the floor to get to the loo because there’s no aisle chair on board. According to a survey of 500 disabled people for the documentary, half have felt discriminated against when flying in the past five years.
Morgan has been disabled since the age of 18 when, after celebrating her A-level results in 2003, she drove friends to a party — sober — at 4am, down winding country roads. She lost control of the car and it flipped into a field, rolling over three times. While her passengers escaped unharmed, she was paralysed from the chest down and told she would never walk again. Instead of heading to Manchester University to study law, she spent four months in hospital before moving back in with her parents in East Sussex.
Determined not to lose her independence, nine months after her accident, she agreed to take part in a BBC documentary to cross the Nicaraguan jungle with a group of other disabled people. That led to more presenting gigs, including several travel series and roles at the 2012 and 2016 Paralympics.
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She launched Rights on Flights in March 2023 via ITV’s Loose Women, on which she was a panellist, after becoming furious that her chair had been damaged for the second time that year on a British Airways flight from LA to London — something she describes as the equivalent of arriving at your destination with your legs broken.
“It’s abuse,” she tells me, twisting her blonde hair in her hands in frustration, as we speak over Zoom. “I can’t tell you the anxiety with which I fly. Beforehand, I starve and dehydrate myself so I don’t need the loo. I won’t risk dragging myself around the cabin floor because that can give me pressure sores. It’s really scary.
“Once, when I told a cabin crew I needed the loo, they said no — it was a five-hour flight, so I assumed there would be an aisle chair on board. I mean, you’ve loaded me on to the plane and you took all my medical information in advance — which, by the way, feels really invasive. What the f***? The captain came out and said, ‘It’s not my problem. My father wears a nappy, why don’t you?’
“Even a couple of weeks ago, a member of the cabin crew came up to me and said, ‘So, in the event of an evacuation would you rather be dragged off by your feet or your arms? I was shocked.”
Little wonder she calls it a “crisis” — a word that, incidentally, is deployed almost every summer to describe the travel disruption experienced in Britain by non-disabled holidaymakers.
“Honestly, I have to bite my lip when people complain about lost luggage or delays at Heathrow,” Morgan says. “What if I told you that you couldn’t go to the lavatory. Would you fly? If I told you there’s a chance your legs would get broken? Would you fly? If I said you might be stuck inside the plane? Would you fly?”
The BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner has posted repeatedly on social media after being abandoned on empty aircraft, when airport staff have failed to deliver his wheelchair to him after landing. “Flying is pretty awful and often humiliating for disabled people. Like most, I avoid it,” says the Times columnist Melanie Reid, who is tetraplegic and recently took her first flight in 11 years, which resulted in an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction as she was manhandled from aisle to aircraft seat.
“The number of disabled people not flying is increasing,” Morgan says. “We all like staycations, but come on. People also have to fly for work, for health reasons, or to see family. It’s cruel. Pet dogs have more rights on flights than disabled people.”
Her campaign has several strands: calling on the government to impose fines on the Civil Aviation Authority for negligence, to increase compensation for broken equipment, and to work with the airlines to create more space on board, so people can travel in their own wheelchairs and use accessible loos.
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Last year she visited Downing Street to deliver a letter to Rishi Sunak. “But there are steps into No 10, so the only way in is on a temporary ramp and two of my party couldn’t get up,” she says. “What does it tell the younger generation? You can’t be prime minister. You are not welcome. But we are coming, whether you like it or not, and we will keep pushing.”
She remains hopeful that Keir Starmer will listen. “The draft legislation we have drawn up could position the UK as leaders in this space.” If the new government is serious about inclusion, she says, “we’re giving it to them on a plate”.
“I don’t want to be difficult, but you have to be if you want to do something” says Morgan
Morgan is energetic and quick to laugh, but such all-consuming activism clearly takes its toll. She wakes up every morning to countless messages from disabled people detailing horrific discrimination and doesn’t always know how to help. In the film, we see her giving a speech in parliament despite feeling desperately unwell.
“I’m physically exhausted and I struggle with the emotional responsibility — I get burnt out all the time,” she says. “It’s tough, with politicians wishing I would go away and the industry saying, you’re trouble. I don’t want to be difficult, but you have to be if you want to do something. If I’ve learnt anything, it’s that when you see change happen it has come at the detriment of somebody’s health.”
What she really wants isn’t a fight, but to work with the aviation industry to find solutions. And they are out there — the film previews a revolutionary prototype seat that flips up to allow a wheelchair to be strapped in which Delta, the world’s biggest airline, should start fitting in commercial aircraft next year.
I say revolutionary, but it actually involves little more than replacing an aircraft’s front seats and removing a few cushions.
“That’s where my frustration lies,” Morgan says. “We’re not asking for huge changes. Why is it so hard? If I have to be brutal with myself and answer that question, this is about an industry who I feel doesn’t want us there. But I’m an optimist. I believe that there will be wheelchair users flying in their chairs in the next few years. I have to believe it.”
Reid agrees: “Happily, there’s good news coming, many years in the making. The industry is on the brink of change.”
Morgan’s positivity has increased since she moved in May to Los Angeles, where she has set up a production company in partnership with Hello Sunshine and will be the first woman in a wheelchair to present the Paralympics coverage in the US, for NBC.
When it comes to disability rights, Britain is lagging behind the US, she says. Morgan has already spoken with President Biden at the White House and, in May, the Senate passed a landmark bill meaning US aviation authorities will have to make planes accessible for disabled people. They are also, she adds, more willing to adapt spaces than in Britain where the attitude remains that “this old building is more important than you”.
“I’ve let go of a lot of the suffering that happens in the UK,” Morgan says. “I’ve dealt with it for 20 years and I’m done. Being out here, I feel like I’m not disabled in the same way. Like, if I want to go on a date I don’t have to worry if I’m going to be able to get into the room. I’m happier and less angry all the time, so I can channel my frustration in a more constructive way.”
Dating is a minefield. Morgan has had several long-term relationships, the most recent of which ended just before lockdown. But there have been men who would confiscate her wheelchair during rows and others who’ve dated her purely for the halo effect. Then there are the creepy messages on social media from those with disability fetishes. Oh, and the stalker who was given a 12-month prison sentence.
Has she ventured on to the LA dating scene yet? Morgan shakes her head. “I’m so not interested. There’s too much to do. I can’t believe I’m here — in a country that doesn’t discriminate against me as much and with this platform. The idea of spending any energy on some person? No. Don’t get me wrong, it’d be nice to have a partner, but I’ve got everything I need — great friends, a great quality of life, a great job. If I get distracted by some love interest, then shame on me.”
Besides, she’s busy outside work. On Instagram, where she has more than 100,000 followers, her profile is filled with videos of her riding her beloved four-wheel motorbike along the Pacific Coast Highway and, recently, doing a tandem skydive. After experiencing zero gravity for the documentary — which made her feel like she could stand again for the first time since her accident — she hopes to become the first British paraplegic woman to make it to space.
“I love my life. I’ve made it joyful, every day, because I know it can be so tough,” she says. “Life with a disability can be every bit as amazing and joyful as anybody else’s. And because of the dark, because of this struggle? The other side feels even brighter.”
Sophie Morgan’s Fight to Fly is on Channel 4 on Monday, July 22, at 9pm
