Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
large numbers of city pairs. In Europe, such networks tended to be publicly
planned and subsidized, whereas in the U.S., the logic of the market was
given relatively free rein. Intra-European
fl
flights and those within the U.S.
were gradually supplemented by
flights to northern Africa, Latin America,
and selected parts of the British Empire (Warner 1938). In the 1930s, Pan Am
deployed four-engine
fl
flying boats with ranges of 2,000 miles, which extended
its network into Latin America and across the Paci
fl
c Ocean, opening up
new passenger and cargo routes and accelerating U.S. in
fi
fl
uence in East
Asia (Allen 2000). By 1939 Pan Am o
flights from
New York to Lisbon via the Azores (Beaty 1976). While widespread civilian
air travel certainly made the world seem smaller, that new perspective did
not mean “uniform” (Zook and Brunn 2006), for air travel re
ff
ered the
fi
first scheduled
fl
fl
ected and
reinforced the uneven urban hierarchies of power and wealth.
As with all other modes of travel, the airplane brought with it profound
changes in the phenomenological worlds of its passengers. With the airplane,
distance became increasingly trivialized, and, like the railroad, telegraph, and
telephone, the experience of
fl
flying was regularly described as “annihilating
space.” Most people
first time compared air travel to the only
other modes of rapid transportation that they knew, i.e., railroads and steam-
ships. Flying, however, o
fl
flying for the
fi
ered a panopticonic vision unmatched by rival forms
of transportation. Balloons, telescopes, cameras, and other such devices all
represented mechanisms for achieving panoramic visions that supersede that
of the body, but unlike its terrestrial counterparts, the airplane of
ff
ered pas-
sengers and pilots a “bird's eye view,” an all-encompassing perspective that
could purport to be objective and all-knowing. The airplane more than any
other technology allowed millions to view the world's surface from afar and
appreciate its vast horizontality. As airplanes folded spaces together, “Per-
haps most notable a loss was the decline of intervening experience in travel”
(Vance 1990:570). Early accounts of air travel of
ff
ered the same exaggerated
expectations of universal accessibility as were found in similar studies of
railroads. Generally, the more rapid the form of transportation or communi-
cation, the more intervening spaces disappear. Rapid time-space compression
thus disembeds places in between, favoring origins and destinations at the
expense of intermediate locales. Hence, “Personally experienced,
ff
fl
flying from
one place to another di
erent location brings on a cognitive form of space/
time compression that is similar to culture shock” (Gottdiener 2001:141).
Airplanes in this sense formed “wormholes” through global time-space, paths
in which locations
en route
ceased to exist or matter.
Airplanes were celebrated therefore not only for their ability to defy gravity
but also for the continuously changing panoramas they generated (Simonson
2005). Air travel became the leading motif of technological sophistication,
military advantage, economic competitiveness, fostering a holistic notion of
the earth as a single, integrated entity. Simonsen (2005:100) argues this per-
spective created “discontinuous geography of collected rather than connected
points.” Modernist movements such as the Futurists celebrated the machine
ff
Search WWH ::
Custom Search