Sympathy and empathy can only go so far. It’s when you experience first-hand the woeful dehumanising treatment that people with disabilities endure daily can you truly understand.

On Saturday, flying into Heathrow Airport from Greece with a wheelchair user friend, I witnessed the abject disregard, humiliation and stress wheelchair users and their families face regularly.

Despite huge amounts of planning, booking, organisation, long-winded check-ins involving wheelchair dimensions, tagging the lightweight portable wheelchair with a massive orange label designed to leave handlers at Terminal 5 in no doubt that it needed to go to the arrival gate for its user’s safe and comfortable exit, and multiple assurances that every measure had been taken for a smooth process, the wheelchair never arrived where it should have.

After a blissful holiday sailing the Greek islands, stress levels soared as our friend was left, with four others who had organised assistance, on the aircraft amid erupting confusion and ineptitude.

We knew the wheelchair had made the flight from Athens because my friend’s travel-savvy wife had invested in an air-tag to track the chair. But no one had any idea where in Terminal 5 it might be.

While everyone else on our flight had passed through Passport Control, collected their baggage and were on their way home, our friend and his wife were still at the plane exit surrounded by muddle and mess because of a rank lack of communication, training and care with a big dose of indifference and disrespect. 

Even the captain, leaving his cockpit with his case, got involved in trying to make sense of what hadn’t happened and find a solution.  

One poor woman travelling solo for the first time since a stroke was also left without a wheelchair, and three others, all of whom had put their trust in the system to meet their needs by making copious arrangements, felt disregarded, stressed and upset.

What made me saddest was that these were people, individuals with their own stories, who were making the most of their lives blighted by physical difficulties – the last people who would want to be seen as a burden or a nuisance to others - were treated like numbers, inconveniences, for not having the physical ability to make others’ lives’ easier.

Our friend is my partner’s closest friend of nearly 50 years.

Once a strapping rugby player, robust father-of-two, sporty, successful, dynamic and charming was struck with hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), one of the most common Motor Neurone Diseases, causing slow degeneration, more than a decade ago.

We’d got on the plane relaxed and happy after the best holiday on board the sailing yacht Martin helmed, the two men enjoying the shared hobby that brought them together as teenagers, firmed a lifelong friendship and had taken them all over the world.

The landing brought us down to earth hard.

Could he walk along the exit tunnel to where a motorised buggy could take them through Passport Control, a woman with a walkie talkie asked him, eyeing his two walking sticks?  

This most humble, delightful, undemanding man, so accepting of his condition and making the most of his life while he can, would have given it a go if he could. He couldn’t and should never have been asked.

“We flew all over Mexico earlier this year and never had a problem with the wheelchair,” his exasperated wife said. “It’s always in the UK.”

A couple of airport wheelchairs turned up pushed by befuddled airport staff, but Martin’s expensive wheelchair was nowhere to be seen.

The farce of headless chickens escalated to a point that my partner and I left to go through 
Passport Control to at least retrieve all our luggage from baggage reclaim to alleviate one worry.

Pulling our bags off, my partner spotted, on the far side of the reclaim hall, Martin’s wheelchair casually propped up against a wall beside an excess baggage sign.

What caught his eye was the massive orange label shining like a beacon that would have told the handler to take it to the aircraft where its user needed it.

It had been ignored.

We now had the wheelchair but the person who needed it was on a different floor of Terminal 5, a buggy ride away and the other side of passport control. And no one cared.

Heathrow Airport failed to meet minimum standards for disabled passengers rating accessibility at the airport as "poor" for April-June 2022 and "needs improvement" for July 2022-March 2023, according to the Civil Aviation Authority.

Heathrow responded that it had a "strong plan" in place to improve and that it is now meeting targets.

Well not according to these users. 

The BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner has recorded his experiences of being left alone on planes at Heathrow.

"Far too many disabled people are left stranded on planes when assistance doesn't arrive on time, or land to find expensive wheelchairs have been damaged or lost on the way," he said.

Disabled passengers were apparently the lowest priority, he tweeted. The disability charity Scope agreed passengers were being "let down." 

Heathrow's chief operations officer Emma Gilthorpe said she wanted to 
reassure passengers a strong plan meant it was now meeting service targets.

Well, it didn’t work for our friend, again, or many others every day, because communications, systems and common human decency fail, or are non-existent.