'It was humiliating': Paraplegic WestJet passenger pulled herself up stairs from tarmac to airplane

A former Paralympian and president of BC Adaptive Snow Sports is urging all airlines to do more for passengers with disabilities after she had a 'humiliating' experience boarding a WestJet flight last weekend.

As a former Paralympian and president of BC Adaptive Snow Sports, Sarah Morris-Probert is a frequent flier.

“I like to travel. I don’t like the means of getting there at times, but I like the end results,” she said.

Morris-Probert told WestJet back in April that she was a travelling with a wheelchair on a return flight between Kelowna and Cabo San Lucas. But when she arrived at the gate to fly home on Saturday, she learned there was no jet bridge to get to the plane. Passengers would be put on buses and driven out onto the tarmac, and there was a lift to get her into the plane. She wasn’t immediately concerned.

“Okay that’s great, I’ve used ambu-lifts and things before,” said Morris-Probert. “So we get on the bus and we go out and discover that the lift they are referring to is two guys carrying me on a Washington aisle chair, which is a heavy chair to start with.”

She argued it wasn’t safe for her to be strapped to a chair and carried up the steps into the plane, and pointed out a wheelchair ramp right there on the tarmac.

“Nobody would deploy the ramp, and so I said ‘Okay, I will transfer to the bottom step, and I will lift myself up step by step,’” she said, adding fellow passengers from her bus watched as she bumped her way up the filthy metal steps to the plane. “It was humiliating, it was degrading and it was gross.”

But Morris-Probert says as a high level athlete and paraplegic, she could manage it, while many others in a wheelchair could not.