My previous research showed that airports already provide a wide range of accessibility support, including sensory spaces, familiarisation programmes, visual guides, interactive training and digital information. For this next strand, I wanted to move away from simply asking what exists and focus instead on what autistic adults themselves are asking for.

Across recent autistic-led, participatory and adult-focused research, one of the strongest findings is that autistic travellers do not necessarily want “more assistance”. Instead, they appear to want greater control over uncertainty, with the freedom to choose how much support they use.

PATHS: Stress Across the Whole Air-Travel Journey

One of the largest recent autism-specific aviation projects is PATHS – Pathways to Stress-Free Air Travel for Autistic Passengers. The project used a mixed-methods approach, combining an online survey of around 300 respondents with three focus groups and co-creation involving autistic people, families, airports, airlines and autism organisations. It examined the journey door-to-door, from planning at home through to reaching the final destination.

The preliminary findings showed that stress does not necessarily disappear once somebody gets through security. Instead, it can remain high throughout the journey and accumulate, with particularly high stress around preparation and arrival/landing.

Participants highlighted the need for:

• accessible information provided in advance
• clearer and more intuitive wayfinding
• calm spaces
• better staff understanding
• flexibility in how support is provided
• greater choice and personalisation.

Interestingly, participants did not all want the same adjustments. For example, some may prefer to board first while others may prefer to board last, and some may prefer a discreet marker on their boarding pass rather than wearing a visible disability lanyard.

This is important because it suggests there is no single “autistic passenger experience”. Choice itself may be an accessibility requirement.

What Do Autistic Adults Say About Existing Airport Support?

A 2024 study by Edwards et al. examined autism-friendly initiatives at Sydney and Gold Coast airports through interviews with 13 participants: 8 autistic adults, seven formally diagnosed and one self-identified, and 5 parents/caregivers of autistic children.

This is particularly useful for my project because autistic adults formed the majority of the sample.

The research found continued difficulties with sensory environments, preparation, access to quiet spaces, staff interactions, and recognising hidden disability needs, despite accessibility initiatives already being in place. Some autistic adults also described difficulties knowing who to ask for help or asking for assistance while already stressed.

This suggests that providing an accessibility service is not enough if passengers cannot easily find, understand or comfortably access it.

Autistic-Led Airport Research

Edwards et al.'s follow-up 2025 study analysed autistic-led environmental assessments across six Australian airports, carried out between 2017 and 2024. The assessments examined eight areas of accessibility, including sensory adaptations, communication, preparation and predictability. Reflexive thematic analysis produced two main themes:

Navigating the sensory landscape and Helping passengers navigate with confidence.

Recommendations included quieter spaces, softer or more natural lighting, clearer visual information, better communication support and improved wayfinding.

I find this particularly valuable because the research did not simply ask non-autistic professionals what might help. The assessments were led by autistic people, strengthening the case for involving autistic travellers directly in airport design.

Wider Quantitative Evidence

Large autism-specific aviation datasets remain limited, so wider neurodivergent transport research is also useful when clearly labelled as supporting evidence.

Autistica's 2025 Neurodivergence and Public Transport project heard from over 550 neurodivergent people across five research activities, including a national survey, interviews, focus groups and workshops. The report identified four major barriers:

• physical and environmental design
• information and communication
• inconsistency, uncertainty and unpredictability
• behaviour and neurodiversity knowledge of other people.

The quantitative findings are striking. Among neurodivergent respondents:

• 90.9% rated noise as unhelpful
• 85.3% identified other passengers' behaviour
• 82.7% identified the effort and energy required
• 75.8% identified smells
• 68.2% identified lighting.

Potential improvements were also rated highly, including quiet transition spaces, single seating, neurodiversity-trained staff, walkthrough videos/photos and ways of communicating without speaking.

These figures are not autism-only and are not airport-specific, so I cannot present them as statistics about autistic air passengers. However, they provide useful quantitative support for patterns appearing in the smaller aviation studies.

Independence Does Not Necessarily Mean No Support

Another important question for my project is what “independent” actually means.

Research with autistic adults increasingly suggests that independence should not automatically be understood as completing everything without help. Instead, autonomy can involve having control over decisions and being able to choose when support is used.

This is also reflected in recent travel-planning research. Mauro et al.'s 2026 study developed and tested a digital travel-planning system with autistic adults. The researchers found that participants wanted to plan trips autonomously, while step-by-step guidance could reduce effort and information overload without taking decision-making control away from the traveller.

This gives me an important principle:

Support can enable independence rather than contradict it.

Supporting Evidence From Autistic Travel Research

The National Autistic Society's Empowering Autistic Travel project provides a much larger UK evidence base. Across its research it received 4,052 combined survey responses, interviewed 20 autistic people and parents/carers, and spoke with 22 transport professionals.

The research mainly focused on buses, trains and taxis rather than aviation, so it cannot directly answer my airport question. However, it reinforces wider issues around unpredictability, anxiety, inaccessible transport and the importance of centring autistic people in transport research.

Initial Reflection

The evidence is beginning to give me a clearer answer to the question “What are autistic independent adults looking for in air travel?”

They appear to be looking for:

Predictability — knowing what will happen and being warned when it changes.

Clear information — visual, understandable and available before it is urgently needed.

Sensory control — options around noise, crowds, lighting, space and recovery.

Choice — not assuming one adjustment works for every autistic person.

Navigation support — being able to understand where they are and what happens next.

Respectful human support — available without judgement or repeatedly having to justify a need.

Communication options — including alternatives to speaking.

Autonomy — receiving support without losing control of the journey.

Reflection

The strongest point for me is that there is no single autistic traveller profile. The PATHS research involving around 300 respondents reinforces this at a much larger scale than the smaller qualitative airport studies.

Independent autistic travellers do not appear to be asking for one universal form of assistance. The evidence instead points towards personalised environments and systems that increase predictability, choice and control while allowing support to remain available when needed.

Another important point that has appeared repeatedly is the value of involving autistic people directly in the design process, rather than only asking for feedback once a solution has already been developed.

This has made me think more carefully about how I could involve my sister as the project moves into design development. Rather than framing the whole project as co-design, which would require a much broader shared methodology and ownership, I could involve her as an active participant within a mini pilot and refinement process.

For example, I could show her airport scenarios, early concepts and prototypes, then work with her to explore what feels useful, confusing, stressful or unnecessary. She could help shape wording, information hierarchy and how support is presented, while I also observe how she responds emotionally to different scenarios.

Her perspective would not be treated as representative of all autistic adults. Instead, it would provide depth and lived-experience insight alongside my wider questionnaire data and secondary research.

This could also become a useful future-development point: a larger project could extend this into a broader co-design process involving a more diverse group of autistic adults.

Could the next stage of my project move from designing solely based on research findings to actively developing and refining ideas with an autistic adult?