Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture (review)

2015

Julia Scatliff O'Grady: Citizens of the Air: Perceptions of Safety in the Social Imaginary of Flight (Under the direction of V. William Balthrop) Despite technological advances in aviation that have made flying more reliably safe, certain rhetorical practices have also normalized the experience of human flight for the U.S. public and have contributed to the perception of flight's safety in what I identify as the Social Imaginary of Flight. I argue that three iconic stories-that of the Wright brothers and the origin story of human powered flight, the story of Amelia Earhart's aviation career, and the heroic narrative of the Tuskegee Airmen of World War IIacknowledged but ultimately downplayed the risks of flying. My project reveals the rhetorical construction of these stories and their circulation in their respective eras and their subsequent recirculation in public memory in order to demonstrate how they each not only generated excitement about flying but also offered reassurance to a public interested in, but a little skittish about, becoming "citizens of the air." In thinking about the "citizens of the air" through a web of discourses related to the sky, I use archival research, critical theoretical frameworks, and discursive analysis. Chapter 2 explores the rhetorical construction and circulation of the Wrights' origin story of flight, which transformed flight from sport and spectacle into a (nascent) form of safe passenger travel, if always provisional. My study considers both the circulating texts related to the story xii 9 The George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers Cover Photograph of Amelia Earhart from Last Flight 1937 Chapter Four 1 Appendix from Black Wings: List of Negroes holding pilots' licenses in the U.S. in 1932.

Revised and adapted as Chapter 2 of my book Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture (2003)

Breathless announcements of the Next Big Thing, and glittering promises about how it will Change Your Life are part of everyday life in the late 20th century. Yet—if you take the long view—that state of affairs is unusual. The idea that you can forecast technological change only makes sense if you think of it as a constant, ongoing part of life. The idea that you’d want to only makes sense if technology changes fast enough for your audience to see the future you’re describing. Broadly speaking, that makes technological forecasting a pastime of the industrialized world in the 20th century. Powered flight became possible at just about the time citizens of the industrialized world began to find technological forecasts interesting. Not surprisingly, a great deal of ink was expended imagining the future of flight. Between 1900 and 1915 alone, the subject inspired novels, short stories, poetry, paintings, and scores of magazine articles—the latter not just in specialized titles, but in the likes of Harper’s Weekly and The North American Review. These forecasts—like most technological forecasts from years past—are interesting not for being right or wrong but for being revealing. They are windows into the early workings of the aviation business, into the minds of the writers who produced them, and into the workings of the societies (for my purposes, Britain and America) that produced them, fa"

The Journal of American Culture, 1984

Anything new in war, while you wait in a confined space, speculating over the nature of a mysterious horror, inordinately protracts the night. '

Technology and Culture, 2004

A curriculum for grades 5-8 The History and Physics of Flight curriculum was designed during the summer of 1998 in a one week curriculum development workshop sponsored by the Mn/DOT Office of Aeronautics. Close attention was paid to the Minnesota Graduation Standards during the development of this interdisciplinary curriculum. To e-mail your comments about the curriculum or for more information about aviation education, please visit our website: