FLYING IN CIRCLES

Airports look like neutral infrastructures, but for autistic travellers they are places where every routine assumes a specific way of perceiving, moving and behaving.

Our research identifies two interlocking cycles. The first is infrastructural exclusion: normative design leads to misrecognition, misrecognition shifts the burden of regulation onto families and individuals, and the system preserves itself through this very delegation.

The second is individual adaptation: travellers and caregivers rehearse routes, pack “accessibility bags” full of sensory supports, mask distress and absorb breakdowns, until they either withdraw from flying or return with even more self-control.

Meltdowns are not about one big event but the accumulation of small frictions: unclear signage, crowded queues, harsh lights, sudden changes.

Too often, staff read them as a threat rather than as distress. The result is that accessibility exists on paper while exclusion persists in experience: some families end up flying once a year at most, others only after months of preparation.

The study shifts the focus from individual accommodation to infrastructural fit, calling for air travel to be redesigned so that it anticipates embodied difference instead of asking people to hide it.