The security correspondent, who uses a wheelchair, had flown back to the UK with Iberia Express on Thursday night after covering the Nato summit in Madrid for the BBC.
Gardner has been repeatedly left stranded on planes at UK airports in recent years, and often forced to wait "long after" other passengers before he could disembark. It is believed this is the fifth such incident.
This week he posted an image on Twitter from inside the aircraft that showed no other passengers in sight.
He wrote: "FFS not again! Just back from exhausting week covering Nato summit in Madrid and quelle surprise, I'm still stuck on the plane at Gatwick. Iberia crew are gone and a new crew has come onboard. Just WHY are UK airports so consistently crap at getting disabled people off planes?" He added: "It never happens abroad, only in UK."
This story is from the July 02, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the July 02, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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