A disabled woman was stuck on a plane for an hour while the cleaners worked around her
Keri McIntyre
- A wheelchair user had to wait for an hour for assistance to get off a Ryanair flight.
- She had to wait another hour in a basement room with no signal after being taken to the terminal.
- She said staff referred to her as "that one" while pointing at her in a "dehumanizing" way.
A "humiliated" disabled passenger was forced to wait an hour for assistance while staff cleaned the plane around her and was then abandoned in a basement room in the airport.
Keri McIntyre, 21, arrived back in London on a Ryanair flight from Rome on July 7 when she was told that she would need to wait "five or ten minutes" for a lift to get her off the plane.
Mcintyre, who uses a walking stick day-to-day and a wheelchair for longer trips, told Insider that the airline's crew kept saying it would be another five or ten minutes and didn't offer any explanation for the delay.
"Staff cleaned the plane around me and handed me over to the next crew," she said. "I felt in the way and it was very humiliating when the cleaners were chatting amongst themselves. I didn't want to be there."
Airport staff were well into preparing the plane for its next flight with its cabin crew already on board by the time McIntyre eventually got off.
Messages she sent to her friend, seen by Insider, shows that she was forced to wait for close to an hour on the plane.
After the assistance finally arrived she was taken to a basement room at the airport with no signal or WiFi, where she had to wait for another hour.
McIntyre, a copy editor, said she "felt like an object" after being told she couldn't go through to baggage reclaim until another group of passengers who also needed assistance had done so. Staff were talking over their heads, she said, and pointing at them.
"One person pointed at me and said 'that one needs to go to baggage'," she said. "It was very shocking and dehumanizing, I didn't like being pointed at and felt like I was inconveniencing them."
Another disabled passenger was left waiting for 95 minutes on a plane last month after staff failed to show up. The passenger, paralyzed from the neck down, was flying on a British Airways flight from Malta to Gatwick airport near London when the incident occurred.
A further two passengers had to wait for two hours for wheelchairs earlier this month when flying on low-cost European airline EasyJet's flight.
Ryanair and Stansted airport did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
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