The Geographies of Air Transport

Andrew R. Goetz, Lucy Budd, Andrew R. Goetz, Lucy Budd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317030638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Making a detailed contribution to geographies of air transport and aeromobility, this book examines the practices and processes that produce particular patterns of air transport provision both regionally and globally. In so doing, it updates the seminal contributions of Eva Taylor (1945), Kenneth Sealy (1957), Brian Graham (1995) and others to the study of air transport geography. Leading scholars in the field offer a unique insight into the key developments that have occurred in the field and the implications that these developments have had for geography, geographers, and global patterns of past, present and future air transport. Although globalization and liberalization processes have greatly expanded the demand for air transport over the last two decades, the industry has experienced several major setbacks due to economic, security, and environmental concerns. Many of these impacts have been much more pronounced in some regions, such as North America and Europe while others, such as Asia-Pacific have not been as adversely affected. Accordingly, there is a clear need to examine these recent economic and geopolitical changes from a geographical perspective given the differentiated pattern of effects from global processes. Addressing this need, this volume opens with thematic chapters covering key topics such as the historical geographies, socio-cultural mobilities, environmental externalities, urban geographies, and sustainability of the global air transport industry, followed by regional analysis of the industry in Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Greater Middle East and Africa as well as North America and Europe.

PART I
Thematic Approaches

Chapter 1
The Historical Geographies of Air Transport

Lucy Budd

Aviation is a question which affects the development, happiness, and peace of the entire world. When, with the growing speed of aerial transport, we shall be able to dine in New York one evening and in London the next; when no part of the earth’s surface, however remote, is more than a week’s journey from London by air, then I think we may say that the coming of this aerial age will do more for the world than any other invention or discovery man has ever made.

Mr Claude Grahame-White, British aviator and aeronautical engineer, in a lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society, London, 19 February 1919

The arrival of the aerial age at the beginning of the twentieth century marked a new era in modern world history. The invention of practical heavier-than-air powered flight provided a new way of moving around the earth and introduced new kinaesthetic experiences of being mobile. In the 110 years since the Wright brothers’ first successful heavier-than-air powered flights in December 1903, continued developments in aerodynamics, propulsion, avionics, navigation, and material sciences have enabled the construction of progressively larger, safer and more reliable civil aircraft which can fly further, faster, longer, higher, more efficiently and at lower financial cost than ever before.

These technological innovations in aircraft performance, combined with regulatory reforms and the emergence of new airline business models, lowered the monetary cost of airfares and facilitated a dramatic expansion in passenger numbers worldwide, particularly after 1945. In the year of the world’s first scheduled international passenger service in 1919, only a few dozen passengers took to the air. By 2012, the figure was 2.8 billion (ATAG 2012). As a consequence, major international airports have gone from handling 50 or fewer passengers a day in the mid-1920s (Dierikx and Bouwens 1997) to tens and even up to hundreds of thousands a day by 2012. Providing the capacity and landside and airside infrastructure to support this level of aerial mobility has necessitated the dramatic (and often controversial) expansion of airports and aviation support facilities around the world.

As significantly, perhaps, the growing availability of – and increased access to – safe and affordable commercial air transport has been responsible for reconfiguring global cultural understandings of presence, absence and proximity. For those with the financial and personal means to access it, air travel has promoted the rapid normalization of a new form of transnational mobility and the creation of an increasingly ‘air minded’ society (on which see Adey 2010). Yet, as numerous scholars have been quick to highlight, the spatial and socio-demographic distribution of commercial air services and airline passengers is highly uneven, and routine access to air travel remains the exception rather than the norm for the majority of the world’s population. Certainly, and as later chapters in this volume will show, air travel’s dynamic distortion of international time/space relations brings particular groups of people and places closer together in both time and space, but this process is highly selective and marginalizes those who are not integrated into the global space of air traffic flows.

In the early years of commercial flight in the 1920s, air travel was expensive and unreliable. Nevertheless, it was portrayed as being daring, fashionable and exciting and quickly became the mobility mode of choice for society’s most affluent and privileged elite. Almost from its inception, powered flight embodied notions of geopolitical power and modernity and over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, civil aviation has influenced the fashions, attitudes, styles, mobility patterns, trade flows, geopolitical relations, business practices and migration movements of virtually every nation on earth. The practices and infrastructures of commercial air travel quickly entered the lexicon of everyday social interaction and airports have become familiar features of our cultural landscape. However, as a consequence of facilitating international connectivity and global socio-economic interaction, aircraft and airports have become a target of terrorist activity and the focus of growing environmental concern about noise, local air quality, and climate change.

Unsurprisingly, the rapid emergence, expansion, evolution and socio-economic and environmental implications of air transport have rendered it a subject of considerable scholarly attention and debate. Worldwide, a large corpus of academic papers, narrative histories, technical compendia, aeronautical biographies and illustrated anthologies detail the planes, the pilots, the people, the processes, the places and the flights that are considered central to conventional historiographies of both civilian and military air transport. Crouch (2003), Edgerton (2013) and Hamilton-Paterson (2010) are among those who have provided valuable insights into the complex interplay between developments in military and commercial aviation while Adey (2010), Cwerner (2009), Davies (2011), Dierikx (2008), Graham (1995), Pascoe (2001, 2003) and Wohl (1994, 2005) have critically examined the impact of changing inter/national economic imperatives, geopolitical relations, cultural discourses, technological priorities and regulatory regimes to the development of twentieth-and early twenty-first-century commercial air transport. Indeed, the scale and scope of the existing trans-disciplinary body of academic literature on air transport is such that arguably few aspects of air transport’s development remain unexplored.

Rather than risk replicating existing accounts, this chapter adopts a different approach which seeks to examine the implications that evolving popular and academic discourses of human flight have had for geographic thought, theory, and practice. In order to reveal the complex interactions between the geographic history of air transport and the history of aviation geography as a distinct sub-discipline of academic inquiry, this chapter is divided into two principal sections. The first identifies key moments in global aeronautical history while the second discusses the implications that the developing global commercial air transport system has had for the discipline and practice of geography.

The Geographic Histories of Air Transport

As numerous aviation scholars and historians have rightly observed it is impossible to determine, with any real degree of accuracy, when the story of aviation begins. While most concur that heavier-than-air powered flight dates back only as far as 1903, historical evidence suggests that humans have been actively trying to ‘conquer’ the air since before the middle of the third century BC. Although gravity proved to be a formidable obstacle for centuries, historical evidence shows that the idea of flight has captured human imagination since ancient times, with many cultures and civilizations containing mythical or religious accounts of winged creatures carrying people up into the heavens.

In Greek mythology, Icarus and his father Daedalus attempted to escape exile in Crete by attaching feathers to their arms with beeswax in order to fly. While Daedalus eventually reached safety, Icarus famously ignored his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun, melting the wax that held the feathers in place and causing him to plunge to his death. Despite this and other cautionary tales, imitating birds remained popular with early would-be aviators, and numerous deaths and injuries were attributed to over-enthusiastic ‘birdmen’ attaching wings or sails to their arms and jumping from tall platforms or hillsides.

In the thirteenth century AD, the English Franciscan philosopher, Roger Bacon, postulated that flying was theoretically possible if air could be made to support a craft in the same way as a boat floats on water. However it was not until the late eighteenth century that lighter-than-air (or aerostatic) flight by means of hot air balloons became a viable technology (see Holmes 2013). While tethered and free-flying balloons afforded a new aerial perspective of the planet, they lacked propulsion and an effective means of directional control. Although dirigibles (airships) partly addressed these limitations, they were slow and cumbersome and a series of fatal accidents irrevocably damaged public confidence in the new technology. Continued experiments by proponents of heavier-than-air machines, including Sir George Cayley in England and Otto Lillenthal in Germany, demonstrated the viability of gliders which, in turn, soon enabled the development of powered heavier-than-air craft.

According to most conventional historiographies of air transport, the modern aerial age commenced at 10.35 am on 17 December 1903 on the windswept sand dunes at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, when Orville Wright successfully took off and flew for 12 seconds before landing. Although only covering a distance of 120 ft, the flight marked ‘the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction in speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started’ (Wright 1913: 12). Despite scepticism in certain media and scientific establishments, news of the flight quickly reached Europe and aspiring aviators began building, and crashing, numerous aircraft in an attempt to emulate Orville’s success. On 25 July 1909, the French aviator, Louis Blériot, became the first person to successfully fly across the English Channel in a heavier-than-air aircraft. However, amid public excitement at his achievement, the flight posed challenging questions about the right of an aircraft from one state to access the aerial space above another (see Debbage, Chapter 2, this volume).

As long as a pilot took off, flew within the confines of a state’s navigable airspace and landed within its national borders there was no problem but international flights threatened the territorial integrity of individual nation states. This situation resulted in one of the longest and most acrimonious debates in aeronautical politics as each country sought to cede as little and seize control of as much airspace as possible while maintaining control over their borders for reasons of defence and national security (see Petzinger 1995). One of the earliest attempts at airspace regulation occurred in 1900 when the French government proposed that a code governing international aerial navigation should be formulated after German balloons made a series of unauthorized flights over French territory (Millichap 2000). By 1901, debates were focusing on the extent to which a state’s sovereignty extended vertically into the air (Dierikx and Bouwens 1997). However, while national claims to land and adjoining seas had been common since Roman times, national claims to airspace were entirely new concepts and international agreement was not immediately forthcoming (Butler 2001).

Countries with rapidly expanding aviation interests, including Great Britain and the United States, initially advocated complete freedom of the skies and opposed any bureaucratic interventions (other than those which would secure their aerial hegemony) while other nations advocated a strict system of national control. The mutually incompatible geopolitical positions held by the British and the French governments were such that attempts in Paris in 1910 to bring international air services under unified control were largely unsuccessful (Veale 1945).

In 1911, the British government passed the British Aerial Navigation Act which declared that all of Great Britain’s airspace (including that of her overseas colonies and dominions) was sovereign territory and therefore inviolable (Butler 2001). This protectionist stance frustrated commentators who considered it ‘absurd to conceive of air travel and air transport in terms of national boundaries and local systems of control’ and warned that such bureaucratic interventions would only impede aviation’s long-term development (Burney 1929: 142).

Although individual states increasingly sought to protect themselves from the threat of aerial attack through the provision of hastily formulated aerial legislation, aviation was being publically promoted as an instrument of global peace and unity. In the 1910s and 1920s regular international air meets, races, competitions and flying demonstrations were held at venues across Europe and North America to engender public interest in flight and stimulate aeronautical innovation (see Wohl 1994 and Demetz 2002). The early pilots and entrepreneurs quickly recognized the commercial potential of air travel and, in 1914, the world’s first passenger air company, the Tampa Bay Line, began operating commercial services in Florida. Although the flights only lasted a few months, they demonstrated that aircraft could be used to transport paying passengers. Nevertheless, despite being promoted as instruments of peace and commerce, aircraft were also being developed as weapons of war and tools of state aggression and oppression.

Aircraft were first employed in a military campaign by Italian forces in what is now Libya in 1911 and, since then, have evolved to fulfil a variety of specialized military roles including surveillance, reconnaissance, troop conveyance, aerial interception, medical evacuation and the delivery of explosive ordnance. The use of aircraft during World War I (see Kennett 1999) demonstrated the importance of states maintaining absolute control over their airspace. This fundamental shift in the spatial geographies of military engagement highlighted the obsolescence of old geopolitical paradigms that were literally grounded in the conventions of two-dimensional terrestrial geography (Graham 2004). Indeed, the use of sophisticated aerial weaponry, military satellites, unmanned surveillance drones and fighter aircraft in contemporary global conflicts demonstrates the continued strategic and tactical importance of achieving and maintaining aerial supremacy (see Williams 2010, 2011a and 2011b for a detailed discussion of the geographies of contemporary military airspace and aerial operations).

By the end of 1918, the need to reconstruct Europe’s shattered economies and enshrine the growing miscellany of national air transport regulations into a series of internationally-binding agreements became increasingly acute as the world’s leading aeronautical nations, including Britain, France and the United States, all vied for aerial supremacy (Butler 2001). With serviceable aircraft suddenly available after the Armistice, demobbed pilots began organizing themselves into air companies to operate these aircraft on a commercial basis (see Sampson 1984).

In August 1919, the world’s first scheduled international passenger flight left London’s Hounslow Heath aerodrome for Le Bourget airfield outside Paris. The flight demanded not only technical expertise but also political agreement and there was concern that international reluctance on behalf of some states to allow foreign aircraft to enter their territory would unduly restrict civil aviation’s development. An attempt at resolving this impasse, while creating the economic conditions that would foster future growth, was attempted in Versailles in 1919.

The right of individual countries to claim sovereignty over their aerial territory was formally enshrined in Chapter 1 of the Paris Convention of 13 October 1919 and signed by the delegates of 26 Allied and Associated Powers (Veale 1945). Signatories agreed that ‘every power has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the air space above its territory’, including that of its overseas colonies (cited in Lissitzyn 1942: 366). However, this right was granted on the understanding that aircraft from all contracting states would enjoy ‘freedom of innocent passage’ through the airspace of other contracting states (cited in Butler 2001: 9). This new regulatory regime enhanced prospects for more closely-connected European empires and profoundly shaped the global geographies of post-1919 air transport.

In a bid to capitalize on aviation’s growing public awareness and stress its utility to the developme...