FRIENDLY SKIES? AC ULTURAL HISTORY OF AIR TRAVEL IN POSTWAR AMERICA

When air travelers read today's newspaper headlines announcing the constantly diminishing features of airlines' in-flight service and the tightening of airport security checks, few may remember the time when travel by airplane was considered an activity that promised fun and excitement. Americans readily accepted Frank Sinatra's invitation to "Come Fly With Me," issued in a song he recorded in 1958 in which he daydreamed about trips to Peru and Acapulco Bay. 3 By the 1950s and 1960s, American tourists were not only flying coast to coast in their own country, but were also busily exploring destinations in Latin America and venturing across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Decreasing fares and faster planes enabled them to go more places in less time. At the same time, air travel promised participation in the desirable and chic jet-set culture that Sinatra personified.

Technology and Culture, vol. 53, no. 2, 498-500, 2012

Machines are made to be used, but histories of technology rarely capture -much less focus on -the user's experience. The smell of purple-inked copies fresh from a spirit duplicator, the syncopated rhythm of a rotary phone being dialed, and the look of television "snow" are not easily reduced to words. Once-familiar bits of practice, known to every user of a onceubiquitous technology, fall into obscurity as it fades from use. The proper technique for adjusting an engine choke, achieving uniform margins with a typewriter, or sending a message with semaphore flags are documented now only in dusty manuals and fading memories. Daniel

Progress in Human Geography, 2007

Geographic perspectives on civil aviation have traditionally been situated within the conceptual landscapes and languages of a transport geography in which quantitative methodologies have been to the fore. While such perspectives have shed light on the increasingly complex morphology of global air routes, this article argues such approaches tend to downplay crucial questions concerning the social production and consumption of airspace. Drawing on ideas from the newly-emergent `mobilities' paradigm, we use this article to flag up some alternative geographies of air travel, arguing that socially- and culturally-inflected perspectives can usefully reveal the iniquitous imprints of global air travel at a variety of spatial scales. We hence conclude that there is much to be gained by adopting such perspectives, and argue that work on the social dimensions of air travel is vital in a discipline where air transport is routinely described as an enabler of globalization, yet is often tre...

2019

This dissertation explores how Trans-Canada Air Lines (1937-1965) built, maintained, and subverted what I call the "modern envirotechnical nation" in its public-facing discourse. Euro-Canadian national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been rooted in both the environment-Canada was imagined as very big and very cold-and communications technologies that allowed settlers to traverse long distances and transcend harsh climates. At first blush, these appear both contradictory and self-reinforcing. How can we, for example, celebrate Canada's size while at the same time technologically annihilating distance? Although clearly commensurate, environmental and technological nationalisms must work for that commensurability, especially in modern, high modern, and late/postmodern Canada. I refer to this work, as well as the discursive products of that work, the "modern envirotechnical nation." I work mainly with the airline's public-facing material, including advertisements, publicity images, media reports, press releases, and speeches by executives and sympathetic politicians to explore this phenomenon. As a state airline, TCA was beholden to taxpayers and worked with government advertisers, which meant that it forwarded something of a statesanctioned narrative of environment, technology, and nation and used its discourse to express larger anxieties about what it meant to be a modern Canadian. TCA worked throughout its first two decades to maintain the modern Canadian envirotechnical nation in this material. Ultimately, it was unable to reconcile the role of air travel in creating new relationships between space, place, time, and the everyday experience of mobility with this paradigm as high-powered jets took Canadians faster and farther than the "modern envirotechnical nation" would allow. I treat air travel in Canada as a high-modern megaproject, a state enterprise designed to forward collective visions of nature, technology, and nation through the implementation of largescale infrastructure. Therefore, this dissertation brings together the historical study of modernity, business, and the relatively new field of "envirotech." Bridging environmental history and the history of technology, "envirotech" sits at the nexus of nature, culture, technology, and power, allowing for a multivalent analysis of technological systems as mediators for human experiences with their environments. I push the boundaries of "envirotech" by interrogating the role of technology in changing perceptions of the environment; TCA's public-facing articulations of the "modern envirotechnical nation" represented Canadian environments not just how they were, but how it ought to and appeared to be to the airline's passengers. Introduction: The Modern Envirotechnical Nation "I thought to myself-what an age-what would the Fathers of Confederation say. Here they are, the two symbols of this age of speed-the babies of the twentieth century-up in the clouds the Airways of TCA-below the Airwaves of CBC-both working like giant needles, knitting this country together...bringing Moose Jaw alongside Moncton...Victoria next to Vercheres...Edmonton with Edmundston...closing the gaps which worried the Fathers." 1 "You asked for it. Today's flight from Edmonton to Vancouver was so blame cold...62 degrees is not fit for man or beast. On the other hand, it apparently was OK for the Canadians (no slur intended)...The least you could do would be warn us [Americans] of your frigid intentions, so we could prepare for the ordeal. Other than that, the flight was fine. You have excellent pilots and capable Stewardesses (but probably cold-hearted)." 2 These two descriptions of flying Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA, now Air Canada) strike at two different aspects of the Canadian flying experience. The first, by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation human interest reporter John Fisher, imagines air travel as a tool of nation-building, knitting the Canadian nation together and solving some of the foundational issues of existing at the edge of geographic possibility that had been plaguing settler Canadians since the nineteenth century. The other, by an anonymous American passenger nicknamed "Warm-Blooded" in TCA's employee newsletter, sees air travel as a rather more concrete experience informed by both his personal comfort level and stereotypes about Canadian affinity for the cold. What can these two experiences, each of which happened on board the same type of aircraft, the Canadair DC-4M North Star, tell us about the role aircraft, airlines, and the experience of air travel played infrastructure was a necessary part of literal and discursive nation-building. A centralized Canadian nation could only be possible, and could only be sustained through the twentieth century, with a network of long-distance transportation and communication in place. At first blush, these two sorts of Canadian nationalisms are contradictory and selfreinforcing. How can we celebrate Canada's size while at the same time seeking to annihilate distance, or at least make it irrelevant, using modern communications technologies? How can the Canadian culture of bigness exist without a way to communicate and subsequently homogenize that bigness, turning a variable nation into a single "big" Canada? Although clearly commensurate with one another, environmental and technological nationalisms have to work for that commensurability, especially in modern, high modern, and late/postmodern Canada. I call this work, and the discursive products of the work, the "modern envirotechnical nation." I imagine this as an extension of what Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim have referred to as the "sociotechnical imaginary": "collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technology projects." 3 They are especially concerned with the role of the state in the development and dissemination of these imaginaries as a sort of aspirational version of a national "technological style." 4 Imagination,