Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 148

Air Navigation Convention of 1919 established freedom of civilian air trans-
port among the 32 countries that rati ed it.

After WWI, a steady series of aviation pioneers opened the skies to

fi

fl ight

for the masses: Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett were y over the

North Pole, in 1926. Flights across the Atlantic using a series of stops began
as early as 1919. Charles Lindbergh's celebrated transatlantic

fi rst to fl

flight in 1927
captured the popular imagination, driving home how close the two continents
had become. Lindbergh's

fl

flight took distinctly national forms, i.e., as the
embodiment of American courage and derring-do, and thus became a sym-
bol that the light of modernism had passed decisively from the Old World to
the New. Charles Smith and Charles Ulm endured the

fl

fi first trans-Paci fi c fl ight

in 1928; Richard Byrd and Bernt Balchen fl flew to the South Pole in 1929; Amy

Johnson was pilot of the solo fl flight from England to South Africa in 1932.

Amelia Earhart, the fi first woman to cross the Atlantic in 1932, later disap-

peared in the Paci fi c. Wiley Post was fi rst to fl fly solo around the world, in

1933; James Gallagher, the fly nonstop around the world, in 1949.

Originally, like almost all novel forms of transportation,

fi rst to fl

flying was
restricted to a small number of wealthy people. Civil aviation could exist
economically only if it were publicly subsidized, a fact that led to the intro-
duction of air mail services in the 1920s, much as carriage coaches had done
in the eighteenth century. The postal service played a key role in stimulating
the growth of aviation, of

fl

ering contracts to private carriers between selected
cities. Like the railroad and steamship, aviation's early impacts therefore can
only be comprehended by including the state as a mechanism of time-space
compression. Banks were greatly interested in aviation's application to the
postal service to reduce the

ff

float of idle money in the mails; airplanes thus
accelerated the velocity of money, with numerous indirect economic impacts.
Other producers of high-valued goods, in which transport costs were relatively
insigni

fl

cant but time to market was vital, took to the medium enthusiastically
(Solberg 1979).
Commercial aviation, like the automobile, underwent explosive rates of
growth. The rapid growth of passenger tra

fi

c allowed airlines to escape their
initial dependence on the mail service to generate a pro t. It also gave rise

to complex and rapidly changing geographies of global accessibility. Aviation
localizes

fi

fixed capital, transferring the risk of production onto private produ-
cers rather than through the

fi

fixed networks of rail lines and highways (Hugill
1993). In many sparsely inhabited regions, air connections were often the only
means of accessing the rest of the world. Scheduled passenger service began
in 1914 with 22-mile

fi

flights by air boat between Tampa and St. Petersburg,
Florida. By the 1930s interurban

fl

flights regularly exceeded 500 miles (Vance
1990), and airline connections gradually expanded across the world in an
increasingly dense spider-web of linkages. Gradually, stronger, multiple
engines, greater fuel-carrying capacity, and better airframes allowed more
all-weather

fl

flights. The 1920s witnessed the birth of numerous national air-
lines (e.g., Sabena, Lufthansa) and regularized passenger

fl

fl flights between