BBC journalist crawls to toilet mid-flight after airline denies wheelchair access
A BBC journalist was left dishonored after being forced to crawl to the toilet during a LOT Polish Airlines flight from Poland to London, as the airline refused to provide an onboard wheelchair. Frank Gardner, BBC's security correspondent, shared his experience on X (formerly Twitter), calling out the airline's policy, which he described as discriminatory against disabled passengers.
Gardner, who has been paralyzed for over 20 years following a shooting by Al-Qaeda gunmen in Saudi Arabia, expressed his frustration in a post. "Wow. It’s 2024 and I’ve just had to crawl along the floor of this LOT Polish airline to get to the toilet... as ‘we don’t have onboard wheelchairs. It’s airline policy.’ If you’re disabled and can’t walk, this is just discriminatory," he wrote, alongside a photo of himself sitting on the plane’s floor.
In a detailed account on the BBC, Gardner explained that the ordeal was both physically uncomfortable and degrading. "It was humiliating to shuffle along the floor of an aircraft in front of other passengers in my suit," he said, adding that LOT Polish Airlines informed him it was not their policy to provide onboard aisle chairs. He criticized the airline for not accommodating disabled passengers, pointing out that such devices are compact and can easily be stored on planes.
Gardner mentioned that he had never faced a similar issue with any other airline and found it astonishing that in 2024, an airline could operate in and out of British airports with a policy that essentially implied disabled passengers unable to walk were not allowed to use the toilet during the flight.
Although Gardner was critical of the airline, he defended the cabin crew, stating that they were as helpful and apologetic as possible. He acknowledged that the situation was not their fault but a result of the airline’s policy, and mentioned that he would refrain from flying with LOT Polish Airlines until they "join the 21st century."
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'MCC-Modi's Code of Campaigning': Cong's dig at EC
New Delhi (PTI): Ahead of the assembly polls schedule announcement by the Election Commission, the Congress on Sunday took a swipe, saying since 2014 the MCC has come to stand for "Modi's Code of Campaigning which will be full of defamation, abuses, intimidation, fear-mongering, and spreading the virus of lies."
The opposition party also claimed that the poll schedule announcement "would have been given the go-ahead by the G2, since G1 would have completed this round of inaugurations, ribbon-cuttings, flag-offs, and launches".
The Congress frequently uses the term 'G2' to take swipes at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, who are both from Gujarat.
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In a post on X, Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh said, "The Election Commission will announce the schedule for the 2026 assembly elections at 4 PM today. It would have been given the go-ahead by the G2, since G1 would have completed this round of inaugurations, ribbon-cuttings, flag-offs, and launches."
"The Election Commission's Model Code of Conduct (MCC) will soon come into effect. But since 2014 this has come to stand for Modi's Code of Campaigning which will be full of defamation, abuses, intimidation, fear-mongering, and spreading the virus of lies," Ramesh said.
The MCC is a set of conventions agreed upon by all stakeholders during the elections. Its objective is to keep campaigning, polling and counting orderly, clean and peaceful and check any abuse of state machinery and finances by the party in power.
The Election Commission will announce dates for assembly polls in Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal and Puducherry on Sunday evening.
The terms of these legislative assemblies are ending on different dates in May and June.
Final electoral rolls of the four states and the Union territory of Puducherry have been published as part of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voters' list.
