Hollywood actress Marissa Bode, known for her role in ‘Wicked’, recently shared her experience of facing discrimination as a differently abled person. Bode revealed in a TikTok video that she was denied boarding a Southern Airways flight because of her wheelchair. She expressed her frustration, stating, “I was denied boarding a flight because I’m disabled. I wish that were clickbait. I wish that were false, but that is what happened.”
Bode recounted the incident where she had difficulty finding her virtual ticket before boarding the flight to Pennsylvania. Upon seeking assistance from the crew, she was informed that she could not board the plane due to her wheelchair. She narrated, “So I got to the gate, and I was like, ‘Hey, could you help me locate my boarding pass?’. And the two people at the gate look at me, and they are like, ‘Can you stand?’ And I said, ‘No’. And they said, ‘I’m sorry, but because of that, we’re going to have to deny you boarding’. They proceeded to tell me all the planes within this airline have stairs to get on the plane. Wild. Never heard of that before.”
Addressing the issue, Bode emphasized the importance of considering disabled individuals, stating, “I was like, disabled people are not an afterthought. Why, knowing that disabled people exist, which y’all clearly often forget, do you choose not to update your planes? And I was like, ‘This is blatant segregation’.”
Southern Airlines’ contract of carriage specifies that customers must be capable of ascending and descending several steps to board the aircraft. Additionally, due to the airline’s small planes accommodating “28 or fewer passengers”, it is not obligated to provide mechanical lifts, as required by the Air Carrier Access Act.
