Now boarding: Towards new geographies of aeromobility

Abstract

In this article, we build on Adey, Budd and Hubbard’s 2007 ‘Flying Lessons’ paper by proposing four trajectories – bodies, infrastructures, technologies and disruptions – along which future research may follow for aeromobility studies. Since ‘Flying Lessons’, concerns for aviation have spread and developed into new areas beyond the experience of the individual air-passenger, but they have also remained somewhat disparate. Our article seeks to synthesise, trace and evaluate these shifts, and to draw out their interconnections, inter-referentialisms and contradictions. We envision a future geographies of flying that is far more entangled and attuned to aeromobilities' ambiguous relations, both human and more-than-human.

I Introduction

Within the space of several years, the airscape has changed and is layered with greater complexity. Some of the world appears to be rapidly moving by air once more after a period of unprecedented disruption. The predicted demise of air-travel has been somewhat exaggerated. By February 2023, air traffic was reported by ICAO to have returned to 80% of pre-pandemic levels, and by the 1^st quarter of 2024 had surpassed them. Of course flight did not stop during the COVID-19 pandemic either. Private business flight was the first sector to recover to pre-pandemic levels and in some cases exceeded 2019 levels. Freight services enjoyed upward growth and rose significantly in 2020 as cargo including food and vaccines, and the distribution of personal protective equipment were under incredible demand (Bombelli 2020; Cole and Dodds 2021), and spare capacity on passenger flights was quickly adapted for cargo space – with consignments even being strapped to seats (Budd and Ison 2023). So-called ‘ghost’ planes sustained commercially valuable landing slots at major capacity constrained airports by flying without passengers (Sun, 2022). Flight endured, but what it has (re)turned into, however, is seriously up for question.

Air-travel is re-emerging through multiple concerns and restrictions, such as from the geopolitical tremors and inflationary shocks from COVID-19, military conflict, as well as moves to decarbonise air-travel, and other interruptions from extreme weather. War has lengthened flight times as some airlines have been forced to reroute around conflict-ridden airspace (Eurocontrol, 2022). And the re-awakening of international air-travel during 2022 was marked by disruption, delays and cancellations, industrial action, lost luggage, the frustration of waiting, new insecurities of the immigration and security checkpoint, safety concerns, the legacy of COVID-19-related paperwork, and new electronic systems and biometric checks. New kinds of costs, including airlines seeking to recoup losses, restrictions and documentation have inhibited aeromobility and some people’s willingness to fly. For others, flight now seems like a reward from (or ‘revenge’ against) a significant period of international isolation, and something to be done before carbon reduction strategies take hold.

In 2007, Adey, Budd and Hubbard’s ‘Flying Lessons’ paper in this journal sought to take the pulse of the field and advance a new set of foci for human geographers concerned with air-travel, especially from within social and cultural geography. That paper responded to a burgeoning interest in flight that extended concerns from within subfields such as transport geography that had tended, although not exclusively, to approach air-travel from the perspective of (de)regulatory governance, and air-travel network efficiencies. Others were concerned with radical shifts in the safety and security of aviation post-9/11 (Dodge and Kitchin, 2004), especially the racialised forms those practices and emerging technologies took; and the gendered historical geographies of piloting (Delyser 2011). Some had begun to explore flying in more social terms with an approach to mobility orbiting around geography, sociology or cultural studies (Adey, 2009, 2010; Cresswell, 2006; Cwerner et al., 2009). The ‘new mobilities paradigm’, amongst wider disciplinary concerns for the politics of movement, provided a conceptual and methodological approach with which to examine flight and aviation.

More recently, geographers have expanded their horizons beyond commercial flying. Contemplating a life/lives ‘after the plane’ (to paraphrase Dennis and Urry 2009), scholarship has recognised a far more turbulent and unknowable terrain that pushes at and beyond the limits of assumptions of human mastery over flight, and, indeed, just what things are considered to fly. It has peered into the air-world of ‘unmanned’ aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones as well as biometric borders and a whole gamut of technological advancements in airspace management and airport operations (Adey 2010; Amoore 2006; Williams 2011a, 2011b). Relatedly, an intertwined body of research concerned with the vertical and volumetric has also emerged, often around theoretical and methodological debates on territory, security and conflict (Billé, 2019; Jackman and Squire, 2021), including in this journal (McNeill 2020). And more recently, there is a sense that flight has very rapidly been revalued, in what Tim Cresswell (2006) has alluded to as the wild but highly uneven valuations of mobility in a post-COVID world, just as seemingly new and old things are flying again.

However, as concerns for aviation have spread and developed into new areas of the discipline and engaged other disciplines altogether, they have remained somewhat disparate and diffuse. Studies have now occupied spaces in (inter)disciplinary corners far beyond the widespread concerns of the experience of the individual air-passenger, but they also await integratory analyses and thematic cross-fertilisations. In this paper, we seek to uncover and build on the potential of these interconnections, and to explore how better prepared geographers could be to understanding the landscapes of contemporary flight, in all its intricacies, folds and projections. In doing so, we do not seek to single out the COVID-19 pandemic as a unique transformational moment for aeromobilities. Instead, we take the events of the last few years as an inflexion point with which to reflect upon and evaluate steps geographers can take to grapple with flight and air-travel in more holistic ways. We wonder how these interests will emerge in the midst of and in adaptations to COVID-19, but equally the current and future implications of climate change and the highly uneven and discursively constructed imperatives to decarbonise air-travel amid national and international Net Zero targets.

We organise our examination of the aerial around the ways air-travel research has been markedly expanded and ‘de-centred’ since the 2007 piece and alight on four key trajectories from which to track emergent and future research directions. We mean this primarily as a series of entangled lines of concern for flight both beyond the commercial sphere, and beyond particular centres. As research moves from outside the subjects and spaces of the Global North especially given that flight has been, and remains, bound to projects of empire, imperial consolidation and colonialism, it is important to de-centre flight from colonial structures of time and modernity, to see flight ‘beyond the West’ (Lin 2016) and away from the dominant places of knowledge production. It also means questioning the sites, symbols and images of what constitutes air-travel, the things we assume to fly and not fly, and to the privileged bodies imagined doing it. A geography of flight today means something far more than and beyond the human.

First, we practice far greater fidelity and resolution to the body within these areas of literature. Geographers have hugely widened who and what counts as bodies that fly, within and beyond the spheres of the typical flyer to include military bodies (inside and outside the aeroplane), persons with disabilities, gendered subjects and even birds and viruses. Geographers have also benefited from access to the spaces and subjects of aeromobility in the context of the aircraft cabin and flightdeck, and, for instance, the often gendered, sexualised, raced and stereotyped bodies that inhabit those spaces, while the most desperate perish in landing gear bays (Ferguson, 2022; Cresswell 2006). Sometimes flying is purposefully a mode of expulsion (Walters 2016). On the ground, an array of (non-flying) bodies make flight, and are – in fact – pivotal (and subjected) to the imagination and logistics of flight too.

Second, aeromobility is generative of and almost exclusively reliant upon technical know-how, specifically the airspaces and infrastructures that support and order aero-(im)mobility, to create these airborne subjects. Beyond the archetype of the airport, geographers have become increasingly attuned to a range of other, perhaps less visible, economies, industries, and architectures that facilitate flight, from the techno-legalistic management of airspaces, to territorial regimes to wage war from/with. In this section, we explore how various geographical subfields – from economic to political to social geographies – enter into conversation with the infrastructures that organise aerial movements.

Third, air-travel has often been bound up in the future, through technological modernism, nation-state and geopolitical competition and other forms of boosterism in what Mahony (2019) calls anticipatory practices of imagination, expectation and prediction. Geographers have been increasingly attentive to how technologies have inspired different promises, renderings and narratives of futures, especially in research on the historical geographies of flight and remote sensing, representations and aesthetic experimentations and expressions of airborneness, bodies of research on drone geographies, and its militaristic, urban and futural manifestations.

Finally, while aeromobilities have been frequently accompanied by narratives of smoothness, certainty and safety, especially to preserve publics from the fears, deathly imaginations and realities of flight, geographers have acknowledged that contingency and failure is also endemic to being in the air, just as we have to investigate further the social and ecological harms flying produces in the context of the climate emergency, as well as our highly uneven roles and positions in relation to flying within academic practice.

II Flying bodies

Flying has been well documented by geographers as an embodied practice that has been normalised in everyday Western societies. There is a wealth of studies on bodies in flight, and the affective and sensory registers of flying, which shape the experiences and expectations of passengers, crew, ground staff, communities living under flight paths, and more (Anderson 2015; Bissell 2015; Bissell et al., 2012; Budd 2011; Jensen and Vannini 2016; Shilon and Adey 2023). But ‘aeromobilities’, which might be thought as a fairly contained, indifferent, part of social practices due to its exclusionary and elite framings, also opens discussion on how different bodies are marked, excluded and highlighted, through the structures of aviation. Here, the human flying body has preoccupied literature, in how social injustices become amplified through flight, as the normative procedures and assumptions of categorising, profiling, securing and organising passenger bodies play out. But other kinds of nonhuman ‘bodies’ – the aircraft and its design, the airport, the local habitats and other lively nonhumans that live adjacent to aeromobility infrastructures (Barry and Suliman, 2023) – play a role in aeromobilities that produce injustices too. While geographers have contested assumptions on the smoothness and ease of air-travel as an elite experience of hypermobility (Cohen et al., 2018; Zuskáčová 2023), there has been an absence of literature on disability and discrimination, and less explored sensations of flying such as discomfort and disorientation.

Budd’s (2011) notable accounts of the early days of commercial air-travel highlight how travelling bodies feel, in which ‘few concessions were made to passenger comfort and flying was a mode of transport to be endured rather than enjoyed’ (2011: 1013). Early passenger flight was also highly exclusionary, and contemporary concerns of ‘flying while Black’ is still a concern of many travellers, with increased security checks, complaints, and confrontations (Bay 2021: 319). Several studies have drawn attention to discomfort and irritation, such as the aural impacts of crying babies (Small and Harris 2014) or the ‘tolerable’ and ‘acceptable’ interruptions brought to light by passenger bodies that do not conform to generic sizes, shapes, abilities, or appearance (Chang and Chen 2012; Currah and Mulqueen 2011; Darcy 2012; Poria et al., 2010). Commercial aviation treats these bodies differently, poorly, and even aggressively. Gendered and trans bodies, for instance, are shrouded in mistrust and confusion, as bodies manifest a ‘conflict between the gender marked on one’s papers, the image of one’s body produced by a machine, and/or an individual’s perceived gender presentation’ (Curray and Mulqueen, 2011: 558). Even the staff themselves, integral to the curation of the ideal onboard experience, have a long history of gendered and sexist discrimination, such as during the HIV/AIDs epidemic, which still echoes today (Tiemeyer 2013). Experiences of ‘fat bodies’, as explored by Evans et al. (2021), highlight the ‘embodied differences’ and the ‘sociomaterialities and micropolitical encounters’ (2021: 1817) that cultures of flying produce. Passengers with a disability, those whose body may require additional support and equipment, report high levels of discriminatory and ‘disembodying’ treatment (Darcy 2012) throughout all stages of air-travel. Aircraft, staff, security, and indeed, aeromobility systems-at-large, in a context of (inter)national regulatory misalignments around travellers which the industry describes as with ‘passengers with reduced mobility’ (PRM) (Budd and Ison, 2020), are severely ill-equipped to accommodate such bodies, let alone offer them a dignified sensory experience of flight (Chang and Cheng, 2012). Aeromobility is a setting in which to study how normative expectations and uses of space are impressed on bodies, where concerns of intimacy and (dis)comfort are left relatively unquestioned for differently able bodies.

Flying exerts ‘restraint and control’ (Walters 2016: 444) over bodies where mobility is not a choice, but a consequence. Safety procedures and instructions aimed at securing and sanitising bodies often abstract flying experiences by relying on stereotypes of the generic passenger body (Barry 2017) and expected social practices in securitised spaces (Adey 2009). While some safety practices are subject to easy rupture and resistance (Bissell and Hynes, 2012) and demonstrate some of the limitations of many narratives of control within air-travel, other security procedures have more concrete consequences for differently able or constrained bodies, as shown in the deportation flights of migrants (Walters 2016), where their bodies are secured through violent and often public, dehumanising spectacles of flight (Bulley and Johnson 2018). Handcuffed to seats and accompanied by security guards, the task of deportation flights, Walters writes, is to minimise interruption and inconvenience for other passengers on board and maintain a ‘level of public and passenger acquiescence’ (2016: 445; Velasco 2021). Such ‘undesirable’ bodies in flight (Martin 2012) are open to even further vulnerabilities and violence, through the ‘tactical appropriation’ (364) of aircraft by smugglers or desperate people.

Indeed, some bodies in flight become proxies for border violence, visa politics, or geopolitical tensions, as bodies out-of-place are set in opposition to exhausted narratives of flying as a ‘non-place’ (Augé, 1994). Highly visible incidents are recalled during the US evacuation flights from Afghanistan in August 2021, where news media broadcast footage of bodies falling from aircraft wings and landing gear as people attempted to escape (Cooper and Schmitt 2021). Of course, scholars are well aware that many smuggled, trafficked or undocumented people are forced to subject their bodies to such drastic attempts at flight. Falling, writes Veal, reveals the ‘aerial within warfare’ (2021: 9), in which these vertical geographies brutally visualise how many bodies are removed, forgotten, and hidden. These examples are far removed from the well-cited hierarchies of bodies sorted by ‘boarding classes’, or categories of ‘supercommuters’ and the ‘kinetic elites’ in commercial air-travel (Demoli and Subtil 2019; Cohen et al., 2018; Bissell et al., 2017).

Inequalities within flying publics goes far beyond wealth and status, linking gender, ability, appearance, race, nationality, visa status, travel experience, and more (Büchs and Mattioli 2021). Those who are deemed ‘deserving’ (Li and Yu 2018), or who may be set on flying as part of their reward for stressful, busy lives, with the tantalising weekend jet-setting away, rationalise this as necessity (Gössling et al., 2019). Framed in this way, the necessity of flight is understood as a personal and corporeal reward: tired bodies longing for escape (Hopkins 2019). However, as Burrell notes, migrant bodies, economy-class passengers or even inexperienced travellers, are seen as ‘just commodities in the airline industry chain’ (2011: 1029). These ‘draining and restrictive experiences of travelling by low cost air carriers’ (Burrell 2011: 1028) inform future decisions on the necessity or urgency of aeromobility, especially for those who live transnational lives. This ‘emotional work’ of contemporary migration is enabled by flight (Burrell 2011: 1029), and can be felt across many expressions of migrant mobilities, such as the hypermobile Fly-In-Fly-Out workers (Bissell et al., 2020), international students or those with no experience of international mobility or flight (Barry and Ghimire 2020). Complicating the idea of the typical frequent flyer, Zuskáčová and Seidenglanz (2019) draw out the experiences of elite frequent flyers from Czechia and Slovakia, in the shadow of the big hubs that usually form the nexus of such studies, further decentring assumptions about Western flying bodies (cf. Adey 2021). Migrants that travel frequently undergo intensive bodily dislocation and disorientation (Bissell and Gorman-Murray 2019; Zuskáčová 2023), with attendant health, social and personal impacts (Cohen et al., 2018). Indeed, considering the risks associated with frequently flying bodies, from situations such as jet lag, radiation exposure, dehydration and physical stasis (Cohen and Kantebacher, 2020), hints at how passenger bodies are much more closely entangled with aeromobility infrastructures at a material physiological level.

Jetlag, as one particular embodied experience of flight, has been considered in geographical and mobilities literature (Anderson 2015; Bissell 2015), foregrounding the entanglement of human bodies with aircraft, environment and the place one finds oneself newly positioned within. Jetlag manifests as a ‘geo-temporal disruption’ (Anderson 2015: 3), linking bodies in flight with highly specific environmental and in situ conditions. Although most scholars do not label such entanglements as explicitly more-than-human, the sensory experiences of flight are dispersed across many types of bodies, not just human. Passenger and crew bodies fuse with the infrastructures of the aircraft, airport and broader logistics of aeromobility systems, bringing to light how human and nonhuman movements intersect. In another angle, the assemblage of human bodies with materials they carry and the infrastructures of flight has been explored in luggage and security (Abranches 2013; Barry and Suliman 2019; Burrell 2011; Hall 2015). Less frequent flying bodies are anxiously organised alongside one’s belongings, as they attempt to comply ‘in order to avoid looking foolish or inexperienced’ (Bulley and Jonhson, 2018: 226). ‘Under the preventative gaze’ of airport security (Hall 2015: 56), passenger bodies are combined with the objects they travel with, rendering a more-than-human type of flying body. But in common with the discriminations explored above, the flying body – despite its privileges – may be a more vulnerable ‘stuck’ body than we might have thought. Amidst the disorientated mingling of bodies, and clothes (acting as barriers and covers), lack of sleep, under the gaze of a predatory voyeur and socially coded norms of politeness, Adiv (2017) discusses her own experiences of gender-based violence and harassment aboard commercial air-travel.

The ‘sensory underpinnings of mobility’ (Jensen and Vannini 2016: 23) has been a preoccupation in geographical research on flying bodies, expanding on earlier evocations of what flying ‘feels like’ (cf. Budd 2011). Contemplating what a 737 aircraft ‘feels’ during flight, Jensen and Vannini (2016) employ ethnography and anthropomorphic speculation to understand different infrastructural bodies in flight. In a similar attempt, Barry (2020) considers what the flight of multiple bodies entangled in an event, including the ‘body’ of a low-pressure system and a full A330 aircraft, experience during extreme air turbulence. Other types of elemental and more-than-human bodies in flight, which are often in close proximity to, or are impacting upon human commercial aviation, have been explored through weather events (Zee 2021), balloons and satellites (Engelmann 2022); migratory birds (Barry and Suliman 2023; Keck 2020; Kim 2022); bees and insects (Phillips 2020); webcams and falcons (Searle et al., 2023), and many more multispecies situations. What they reveal is not just a verticality that extends beyond human scales of flight and infrastructure, but how experience and sensation of aeromobility breach our human grasp, too. More-than-human bodies show us a world of flying that humans don’t have mastery over. These unpredictable aeromobilities transgress borders, geopolitics and infrastructures (Barry and Suliman 2023), becoming connective tissue in vast ecological and planetary systems that are yet to be fully explored.

Avian bodies, in particular, have been relatively under-considered in aeromobility literature, despite these bodies being a key conduit between human and disease, with the recent re-emergence of avian influenza as a global concern (Keck 2020). Bound within systems of monitoring and surveillance, more-than-human flight brings to the foreground concerns over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mobility (Hinchliff and Bingham, 2008). Biosecuring is a more-than-human concern, in which mobile bodies span human, animal, disease and pest, and often manifests at airport borders and infuse human travellers with nonhuman ‘threats’ (Barry and Ghimire 2020; Potty-Sherman and Wilkes, 2016). These studies on more-than-human flying bodies also gesture towards the broader environmental impacts of aeromobility in which a slower violence plays out on nonhumans, where the human ‘necessity’ for human flight inevitably disrupts the established seasonal and habitual forms of flight in other species and systems.

III Infrastructures and airspaces

Bodies are not the only site where injustices, exclusions, violences and politics play out. Aviation is also highly territorialising and differentiating in the way that its infrastructures are organised, demarcated, set apart and contested. In Adey et al. (2007), air traffic control centres and airports were cited as two archetypal forms of aeromobility infrastructure – housing critical equipment, workstations, aerial and ground movement radars, check-in counters, security checkpoints and departure lounges that determine the uneven experiences of mobile subjects. Geographers are now tackling a wider range of flight infrastructures that are equally divisive, but perhaps less tangible or visible.

Taken in the literal sense of aeromobility’s medium, airspace is one such case of a ‘hidden’ infrastructure. Far from an invisible transit zone, geographers have considered the laws, logics, technologies and technocratic practices that produce and govern this space (Budd, 2009). While early interest in airspace had been on the legal landscape of air rights and the allocation of airline capacity (Bowen, 2010; Raguraman, 1986), the rise of single aviation markets has caused this focus to shift towards the economic geographies and environmental outcomes of air liberalisation. For instance, geographers have examined how the dismantling of internal tariffs in the EU Single Aviation Market has led to an increase in – especially low-cost – air traffic (Dobruszkes, 2013), posed a challenge to sustainability goals (Graham and Shaw 2008), and, ironically, prompted nationalistic or protectionist responses from states.

EU airspace is not just instituted as a free market zone, but is also re-territorialised as a ‘Single European Sky’ for navigation (Williams 2011a). This initiative, aimed at unifying cross-border procedures and replacing state-by-state oversight with a route-by-route framework, is intended to reduce inefficiencies and conflicts in Europe’s air traffic management (ATM) system. However, in streamlining control of the region’s airspaces to nine transboundary ‘functional airspace blocks’, the initiative again ran counter to national territorial idea(l)s of airspace sovereignty and military secrecy (Lawless, 2014). To untangle these divergent priorities, socio-technical reforms were sought through the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) programme, which uses predictive and trajectory-based algorithms to offer virtual visualisations of the sky. By harnessing digital and non-sensitive information generated by location-finding technologies on commercial aircraft and via satellites, these visualisations transform the way airspaces are imagined and practised through remote management of ‘data’ (cf. Williams 2011a). The end result is not just a more voluminous airspace for navigation generally, but specifically a higher capacity to facilitate flows of labour migrants across the region, while harmonising policies and integrating EU economies on the ground. These connections suggest room for research on the technological underpinnings that enable – and necessitate – particular forms of international relations to take shape: from questions of international sovereignty for security policing (Klauser 2022) to the institution of state-enforced movements such as deportation flights (Walters 2016) to the regulation of new cross-border passenger services offered through technologies such as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft (Scott 2024).

Similar developments in air traffic management have been recorded outside Western Europe and North America as well. Lin (2016) and Harris (2021) have written about the rapid growth of air traffic in Asia, and the corresponding ‘pressure’ to fit more aircraft into the air and on the ground. But in Nepal, a deadly confluence of unpredictable and unforgiving highland weather, small airports and tight manoeuvres often means that the country depends on foreign navigational standards and technologies – disseminated through the ICAO’s No Country Left Behind programme – to keep up with the demands of global capital. Analogously, Lin’s work reveals a parallel story of the paternal governance of airspace in Southeast Asia, but this time with the aid of a mediating sub-regional power – Singapore. In ways reminiscent of the sovereign sensitivities in the EU, he details how Southeast Asian states collaborated on the virtual surveillance of South China Sea airspace, but not without first seeking technical expertise from the US (Lin, 2018, 2020a, 2020). Paying attention to the internal geopolitics of Southeast Asia, Lin argues that this ATM regime did not only invoke colonising knowledge from the ‘West’ again, but also led to uneven speeds of development across the region.

Yet the most overtly geopolitical concern with aviation has pertained to its use to wage battles. Flying, of course, contributes to the growing carbon footprint of militaries (Belcher et al., 2020). But what is more insidious is the use of ‘uncrewed’, ‘remotely piloted’ and formerly named ‘unmanned’ aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones for military warfare and policing. Enacting what Gregory (2006: 94) calls a ‘vertical geopolitics with a vengeance’, warfare by UAVs charts long ‘lines of descent’ that date back to as early as World War II, when aeriality was first valued for its ‘omniscience’ and aerial capacity for ordnance (Gregory 2013). Indeed, the discursive conceptualisations of the ‘target’ – an abstract rationality whose production, and ultimately destruction – often spells catastrophic consequences for its victims (as starkly evidenced by the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian and 2023 Israel-Hamas wars). By fostering a datafied apparent ‘persistent presence’ through the cyborgian coupling of humans with machines (Williams 2011b), they perversely enable a cloak of impunity for attackers, as lives are reduced to tactical responses (Adey et al., 2011).

However, geographers (including Gregory) have tried to temper these macro understandings of geopolitical airspace with a simultaneous attention to the minute practices and attunements that alter and refract the sky. Usefully, these writings help to decentre narratives of technological omniscience and determinism (Parks, 2017; Gilbert et al., 2018; Veal, 2021). Indeed, while the ‘view’ afforded by the UAV infrastructurally seem to unite a whole gamut of senses, experiences, intimacies, distances, proximities and interactions with troops for its distant operator (Gregory 2013; Shaw 2013), these relations are also not seamless, but are highly antagonistic, fractured and deserving of attention for their unexpected recombinations.

Airspace is, on another register, increasingly subject to military competition, blockades, incursions and surveillance too; precisely because of the visualities and what McCormack (2018) has called ‘soundings’ – forms of listening and ‘making explicit’ – it (threatens to) afford. In recent years, more and more politically sensitive airspaces have been outrightly prohibited from use, often unilaterally. In 2013, China singularly announced that the sky above the East China Sea would be designated an air defence identification zone for military purposes (Bilal 2014). This prompted retaliatory declarations by Japan and Korea, but also presented confusing overlaps with flight information regions used for civilian ATM (Lee 2014). Such claims to large swaths of the stratosphere are sometimes supported by military displays of air power, most commonly in the form of ballistic missile launches or fighter jet incursions into disputed (air) territories (e.g. by China across the Taiwan median line). These are on the one hand reminders of state power and even national identity, such as those seen at military airshows (Rech 2015). But on the other, as Closs-Stephens (2022) has explored in relation to witnessing a national airshow, they may also be felt far more weakly, divisively and dissonantly.

Concerns for the atmospheric and affective geographies of air power are certainly attuned to the ‘allure’ of things that fly such as the high-altitude balloons, drones and other remote sensing equipment that act as stealthy monitors of (others’) airspaces, as recently demonstrated by the 2023 US shoot-down of a Chinese ‘weather’ balloon. Simultaneously, the ambiguities of affective relations mean such events have multiple and unstable valences, operating in what Garrett and Anderson (2018) call the Nephosphere – a vertical zone of experimentation and ambivalence. Indeed, these missions can potentially fuel interstate mistrust, hypervigilance and a counter-politics of seeing, as exemplified in the wild-goose chase for more (and phantom) balloons – harking back to, or even resurrecting the Cold War – and the discovery of several unidentified flying phenomena. Where the spectral traces of aerial presence have frustrated observers and spy agencies, they also evoke wonder, joy, fear and concern among the public. Geographers are increasingly realising the limits of the apparent control of airspace, tamed by visual and other (remote) sensing practices in the ‘affective atmospherics that accompanied the prospect of seeing something in the sky’ (McCormack, 2018: 187).

In short, geographers are becoming more and more cognisant of the myriad infrastructures sketched into the sky to advance aeromobility – whether in the form of airspaces made more capacitous for capital, or invented territorial regimes to guard and to fight from. Yet, if one considers the most recent (post-COVID) developments, there are yet more infrastructures that remain to be interrogated, including the proliferation of platform- and automation-assisted procedures at airports, and the growth of satellite-enabled surveillance industries, including players like Maxar and Inmarsat. These endless investments, to make the sky even more efficient, in sync with the ground and draconian in its watch, indubitably come at a cost to human lives (sometimes literally) and the labour that attend to it – people whose bodies must now work harder to accommodate this ever-rising demand for flight (Harris 2021). They also pose a challenge to geographers, who must now innovate – both epistemologically and methodologically – to engage with technical agencies and experts (who are often cloaked in secrecy), in order to grasp the full suite of registers that actually make up today’s expanding aerial infrastructures.

IV Technologies and imagined futures

While there is no shortage of technical literature on advancements in aviation such as hydrogen aircraft, electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicles, or increasingly predictive operations systems, a significant portion of recent scholarship on aeromobility deals with the relationship between technological development and dreams – some starry-eyed, some fearful, some ambivalent – of the future. Here we focus more specifically on the promissory capacity of technologies in shaping imagined futures. Although work on new technologies tends to be forward-facing, looking simultaneously at both contemporary and historical speculation on technological transformations in flying can better pinpoint ‘the place of imagination and imaginative geographies in the promises and politics of sociotechnical transformation’ (Mahony 2019: 1296). For example, aviation is an industry that is often renowned for showcasing fast, new, predictive technologies, and airports have been argued to sometimes exhibit the characteristics of possible harbingers or blueprints of wider public space (Nikolaeva, 2012). Conversely, there is a significant temporal gap between the imagined existence of new drone platforms or the revival of airships, and the often-painstakingly slow process of bringing these objects or ideas into being through testing, implementation, standardisation and certification procedures. In other words, the temporalities of aviation can differ greatly in different contexts, resulting in outcomes that do not always follow a dominant discourse.

Martin Mahony’s work on historical geographies of the airship is a case in point, demonstrating how British imperialist expansion up and across the atmosphere was premised on future expectations, predictions and imaginations, and how such practices carve out new roles for the state (Mahony 2019: 1287). Similarly, other studies of older, emerging technologies such as pre-aircraft prototypes show the various ways technologies-in-the-making ‘prefigure specific versions of the future’ through which they eventually find their place (Maguire 2018: 27), as in the helicopter urban dreams of post-war urban planning (Brook and Dodge 2014), or even the aforementioned VTOL flights currently in-the-making (Scott 2024). Such theorisation on past technological developments is helpful for thinking through the way current experiments and trials in aviation also create openings for new socioeconomic and geopolitical understandings of where aviation and flight may be heading. For instance, Helene Ilkjaer’s (2019) work on user testing of intelligent airport trolleys, the introduction of automated boarding gates (Oostveen et al., 2014), software simulations (Budd and Adey 2009), the emergence of autopilot (Elish and Hwang, 2015), electric taxiing trials (Peterle and Harris, 2024), airport terminal cleaning, police and concierge style robots (Lin et al., 2024), allows room for unexpected improvisation, continuous tweaking, and the sharing of polyphonic stories of what the future airport may look like. But these anticipatory practices are also telling of the ways in which social futures are crystalised, especially how a nexus of geopolitical and corporate ambitions can alight upon certain objects to be suggestive of possible futures.

Thinking about aviation technologies in the next decades – particularly against the backdrop of a climate crisis and subsequent UN-led legislations on emissions – has also involved studying how bureaucratic, policymaking, and regulatory atmospheres play an affective and improvisational role in the political future of aviation, such as at International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) summits (Lin 2021), or how future horizons in aviation – planning for 2050 at International Air Transport Association (IATA) conferences, for example – produces ‘global temporal regimes’ that often neglect the specificities of aviation planning in the Global South (Harris 2021). Here, the logics of future-orientated aviation (even while some of them may be revivals from the past, such as airships) may be out of sync with different social contexts and temporalities. This is also true for arenas such as gender. The emergence of drones or UAVs brings with it a host of new socio-spatial configurations, such as debates over the place of drone hobbyists, retail drones, and domesticity (Fox, 2020; LaFlamme, 2017; Richardson, 2020). In Jackman and Brickell’s (2022) feminist account of ‘everyday droning’, for instance, home drones, such as plant-watering drones or house surveillance drones, bring efficiency logics and the ‘anticipatory horizon of militarization’ down into the scale of the home, promising new ways of displacing social reproduction and care work that continue rather than break with modernist narratives of technological solutionism to gendered divisions of domestic labour.

Future technological imaginaries also involve attending to the more invisible attributes in and of the air – for instance, specific kinds of atmospheric attunements such as pollution, turbulence, or evidence of climate change. Other researchers seek to make sense of the experience of elevated transcendence in more speculative terms – defined not simply by corporeal feelings of passive anticipation, but, more generatively, the energies, materials conditions and (representations of) weather phenomena and climate change that confront the former while in-flight (Engelmann et al., 2022; Engelmann and McCormack, 2018). In these more diffusive registers, airspace is re-conceived as an infrastructure that not only enables vertical dwelling, but also actively (re)frames imaginaries of places, their problems and their possibilities for the dwelling bodies. It becomes an infrastructure of thought, and a conduit through which one learns about flying and the ethics and aesthetics of being in the world.

There is increasingly more research on the historical geographies of flight and (post)colonialism through which aeromobility and its futures are entwined. The planning and imagining of air routes and airports attracts publics through dreams of national futures, asserting (post)colonial geopolitical ambitions (Bok, 2015; Lin, 2020a), as Caprotti (2011) reflects on the historical role of aviation imagery and route maps played in the expansionist imaginaries of fascist Italy in colonial Ethiopia (see also the Caribbean, India, South Africa, Palestine, and the US-occupied Pacific: Bhimull 2017; Iqbal 2022; Mirza 2022; Pirie 2014; Shamir 2022; Williams 2017). In opposition to some of the feminising narratives of flight’s technological modernity (discussed earlier), however, heroic, masculinist associations of aircraft were reasserted and adapted through the hardships of aerial Polar exploration and scientific practice (Bruun 2022). Yet, national or imperial economic and political projects inevitably leave spaces and peoples behind. This fact has been used as a discursive argument for burdening the environmental injustices of some aerial infrastructure upon peoples apparently living in the past and kept from progress, as Bichsel (2021) explores in the postcolonial and postsocialist impact of Soviet rocket drop zones in Kazakhstan. Or, as equally, East and West African states have become some of the most important sites for drone delivery innovation and airspace regulation, albeit by refuting Eurocentrist assumptions of unregulated (post)colonial frontiers (Lockhart et al., 2021) and emphasise instead continuations of highly regulated, monopolised futures whose values are enclosed by proprietary technology firms interested in expanding new markets.

Both historical and contemporary geographies of aerial technologies in fact connect in time and future work can engage with these connections. From the development of British airspace in the early 1900s, where the sky was understood and imagined as an expanding space of mobility (Simonsen 2018), to the advent of drone and satellite surveillance both from the ground to the sky and vice versa (Adey et al., 2011; Jackman 2023; Lin 2017a), this expansion of how the sky is ‘sensed’ for future gains can be read alongside recent literature on volume and state territoriality (Adey, 2010; Billé, 2019; Elden, 2013) as the ground and air are coming together in quite new ways (Klauser 2022). Speculative aeromobile futures can also be understood more clearly through the more micro-level use of objects or materials themselves, as Anna Jackman’s work on the design of drone patents demonstrates (2022). Here, drone patents provide fodder not only for understanding how the sky may be ‘sensed’ or imagined by designers, but also what it may mean for financial profit, through the future potential of patents as valuable intellectual property invested in speculatively with venture capital.

Such work is but one example of a verdant and emerging aeromobilities research area that we suggest should focus on speculation (Jackman 2022). Similarly, Peterle and Harris (2024) use comics as a method to visually depict aviation workers’ multiple – and conflicting – imaginings of what experimental pushback vehicles can do at the moment, but also what they could look like in the future. In this way, technologies both past and present play a prominent role in shaping alternative futures, often for political ends and capitalistic gains (Lockhart et al., 2021), yet without this kind of critical work, they may engender incredibly poorly understood and neglected social consequences that we must examine. For instance, Jackman’s (Jackman and Hooper, 2024) recent report in concert with the legal practice Garden Court Chambers sets out the possibilities of domestic drones being misused for the purposes of stalking individuals and perpetuating gender-based violence, particularly against women. These are ‘geo’ and ‘aero-legal’ possibilities, even of academic and legal practitioner collaboration (in Jackman’s case), massively unanticipated within the disinterested speculative boosterism of the domestic drone patent. It is in this multidimensionality, of looking both upwards and downwards, as well as forward and backward in time, and across expertise, that aerial transformations of today can be properly appreciated, and where a framework for future research in aviation might lie.

V Disruptions and emergencies

Recent years have undoubtedly brought darker tones to what has been increasingly perceived as troubled or troubling flights. The modernist promises – and futures as we have seen – of seamless, time-saving air-travel assured by finely-tuned technological safety and security policies have been met with disruptions and failures of various kinds that have brought to the fore issues of materialities, agencies and temporalities at stake in flying which are matched with scholarly approaches to flight far more attuned to weaker understandings of agency and power.

While flying accidents and interruptions constitute a common – albeit rarely deadly – feature of aviation, various heavily mediatised unexpected happenings have not only exposed its often-forgotten hazardous nature but also led to moral panics, shaking the day-to-day global fabric of societies. Suspending air traffic in the wake of its ash cloud, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in 2011 gave rise to a myriad of analysis (e.g. Birtchnell and Büscher 2011) on the sudden manifestation of nonhuman agencies, challenging their oft-overlooked and routine relationships to airspace. Several subsequent notorious incidents, from reservation systems glitches to the 2023 New Year’s outage closing Filipino airspace, have made even clearer the limits to inhabiting the skies. They have altered in minor but dramatic ways our knowledge of the world attached to the positioning of aircraft in space, challenging the taken-for-granted technical assurance in flight that the popular activity of application-based flight real-time tracking illustrates. Geographers’ approaches to aeromobile disruption has been one of the revelations of aviation systems and infrastructures and their embeddedness.

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Gulf of Thailand in 2014, tellingly caused a techno-moral panic. The extensive and, as yet, unsuccessful search proved to be the most expensive in aviation history, leading to a proliferation of initiatives and technological efforts to find traces of the aircraft, scrutinising the air (by satellite), the sea (by helicopters) and the deep ocean (by submersible), to fill the knowledge gap created by its absence. Mobilised capabilities, such as the Bluefin 21, a US-made autonomous underwater vehicle used by the Australian border force to map the seafloor, were seen as a show of force in the interstate rivalry at play in the Asia Pacific region (Chong and Chang 2016). Geographers could further explore how the disruptive missingness of aeromobile objects contrasts with modern assumptions about technological connectivity and the understanding of one’s place in space, producing ‘yearning space[s]’ (Parr and Fyfe, 2013: 619) and challenging the politics of mobility. Even so, MH370’s mystery also reminds the racial divides which segment bodies seeking to gain access to international aeromobile systems, as discussed earlier. Pallister-Wilkins (2022) considers the case of two Iranian nationals who were travelling on MH370 with fake Austrian and Italian passports: they may have been attempting to claim asylum in Europe, but were initially linked with suspicions over the flight’s possible hijacking because of their ethnicity and religion. The case reveals again, even in crisis, the ‘unequal regimes of mobility’ which rely upon racialised privileges and a ‘system of passports, visas, airlines and other legal transport providers policing who can move and how’ (Pallister-Wilkins, 2022: 27).

The yawning question of the technological and institutional agencies involved in aviation disasters was exacerbated by the global grounding of Boeing 737 Max aircraft following two crashes in 2018 and 2019 which killed 346 people. The malfunctioning of automation and sensors linked to a flight stabilising feature was proven to play a key role. Such design choices have extended into airspace ethical and regulatory issues already at stake in more classically identified automated vehicles such as self-driving cars, and assumptions over the primacy of the human in decision making and responsibility both in the aircraft cockpit (Taylor & De leeuw 2021), as well as the biometric, algorithmic and generative AI underpinning many aviation security and passenger-targeting systems at the ‘deep border’ (Amoore 2021). While they have been addressed primarily in the field of engineering (Sgobba 2019; Herket et al., 2020), they are part of broader entanglements with private interests, political economies and the geopolitics of the aircraft certification process and grounding decisions.

The resurgence of geopolitical tensions has also added to uncertainty and violence to the civil aviation community. The destruction of MH17’s aircraft over eastern Ukraine in 2014 served as a catalyst for revived airspace management challenges and deeper academic scrutiny of the contested geopolitics of airspace, including even quantitative techniques for visualising the extent of military ‘special use airspace’ bases in the United States (Havlick and Dao 2023). These questions range from airspace avoidance (including militarised restricted airspaces) (Dobruszkes and Peeters 2019; Havlikck and Dao, 2023) to arduous disaster investigations (Kuipers et al., 2020) involving public, private and nonprofit organisations. Questions of volumetric sovereignty have been further illuminated by the suspect diversion of a passenger flight to Minsk National Airport in 2021 in order to arrest two Belarusian activists (Huttunen 2021).

Beyond – or related to – these disruptions of flight, the greatest challenge to aviation arguably pertains to the climate and ecological crisis. The multiple processes feeding the ever-increasing practice of air-travel are highlighted by many studies, such as the globalisation of work or tourism-related mobilities (Barr and Shaw, 2022), the social norms of air-travel consumption and the rise of low-cost aviation (Bissell et al., 2017; Harris and Daniels 2022; Higham et al., 2014; Hirsh 2016).

Following these concerns, scholars have queried what flying means for academia and academics going forward (e.g., Bjørkdahl et al., 2022; Katz-Rosene and Pasek 2023) – including in a virtual session cheekily titled ‘Are you going to the Hawaii AAG or not?… OR NOT!’ at the 2024 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. In the face of efforts to curb flying for international conferences for some, this can come at the expense of opportunities for early career researchers and particularly for academics who are remote to or at the periphery of academic knowledge networks (Higham et al., 2022). There is no doubt that geographers need to further engage in the broader debate on people’s willingness and capacity (not) to fly but also on the implications of flights (reduction) on their social networks and relations, employment opportunities, their own life chances and the lives of others.

‘Fly less’ movements have also emerged. Spatially and socially situated, they range from the (heavily commented) emergence of flight shaming (e.g. Gössling et al., 2020) to the far less examined burgeoning climate protests at airports, aimed at disrupting flying. These protests attest to a broader bottom-up politicisation of air-travel worth of study, illustrated by, in other contexts, the irruption of Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 social movement at the airport (Iaquinto et al., 2023), resulting in two days of closure and over 1,000 cancelled flights, or by the dramatic influx of people at Hamid Karzai airport in 2021 seeking to flee Afghanistan with the fall of Kabul (Quilty, 2023). So far, however, these protests – whether ecologically driven or not – have not eroded the expansion of (highly emissive) aeromobilities. Indeed, political lobbies remain tethered to air-travel’s embeddedness within societies and economies, and favour stronger and even violent state security responses to such resistances (Iaquinto et al., 2023).

Even some traits of the COVID-19 pandemic have reinforced the semiotic value of flying with the live-streamed spectacle of PPE (Lin 2020b) and vaccines arriving on repatriation flights. They echo the life-saving – or even the deus ex machina – role given to flying in multiple emergencies, be they humanitarian, military or in response to disasters, resulting in backlogs and international cooperation to share helicopters and air tankers. This role could be studied in greater depth, especially in relation to climate change adaptation. While aeromobilities is a (paradoxical) resource for this challenge, the vulnerability not only of air passengers, but also aviation infrastructure (Voskaki et al., 2023), to more frequent and heightened hazards, extreme weather and increased clear-air turbulence (Ryley et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2023) – as saliently captured by the deadly Singapore Airlines Flight 321 incident in 2024 – requires more attention. Climate-proofing airports, for instance, could involve abandoning (or elevating) coastal airports due to rising sea levels and increased risks of flooding, and favouring inland airports.

The far-reaching inscription of aviation in the contemporary world has disguised its contribution to environmental emergencies that are now increasingly documented. Aviation contributes directly to extractivist systems by ensuring their crucial logistics, such as ‘terraqueous’ connections between offshore oil platforms and onshore locations like Takoradi Air Force Station in Ghana (Chalfin 2019), as well as the mining of aluminium ore (Sheller 2014). Even so, aeromobilities tend to be separated from other mobilities and other related sectors (such as tourism) in climate action planning. This exceptionalism has led to aviation eclipsing and backtracking on the domestic emission reduction efforts of small and medium-sized countries (Frétigny et al., 2024). International negotiations to curb emissions growth have proven to be particularly thorny, involving complex geopolitical negotiations across the North-South divide (Lin 2017b). While ‘transition policies’ for flying are called for, with tools including CO₂ levies (Gössling and Lyle 2021), concerns arise about the socially and spatially inequitable consequences of reductionist measures (Adey et al., 2021), as aeromobilities extend far beyond the aviation sector (Lin and Harris 2020). The question of airport closures, particularly acute for remote communities (Gallacher 2023), further illustrates the challenge of mapping out ‘just’ strategies for future aeromobilities.

Unlearning to fly or learning to fly differently involves cultural and political transitions as well as new geographical imaginations. Envisioning flying light (Barry and Suliman 2019), environmental mobilisations in terminals (Frétigny 2016), participatory planning on airports and air-travel (Jensen and Sheller 2023) or a low-carbon, ‘slow travel’ industry of tourism, illustrate the contentious possibilities of pushing the envelope beyond existing impasses of aeromobilities to address current and future environmental emergencies.

Theoretical and practical integration of what aeromobility activity does to planetary, urban and rural liveability is furthermore needed beyond the predominant spotlight on the atmosphere. In the case of airport noise, for instance, terminal airspace is seen to regularly interface – and interfere – with the social needs and priorities of urban dwelling. And McDonough (2017) and Winke (2017) precisely encourage us to think of flight paths (both civilian and military) as vertical layers of the urban fabric and urban economics, while Peterson (2017) argues that the ‘edge spaces’ of airspace are intricately tied to the senses and sensibilities of social bodies. Geographers could draw on such propositions to map out more widely these entanglements in order to conceive more fitted, ambitious and multiscalar public policies and tools regarding planning, the regulation of the industry, geopolitical framings and people’s practices.

VI Conclusions

In 2007, Adey et al., argued that geographers ‘need to move beyond a mapping of air routes to present empirically-grounded studies of the variegated – and contested – geographies of aeromobility’ (15). To be sure, geographers have learnt to fly. Yet in a moment of unprecedented uncertainty and disruption to aviation, we have had cause to pause and reflect on our engagements with flight. Geography’s encounter with flying has been massively distributed to different corners of the discipline, and in interdisciplinary spaces and currents. While ‘Flying Lessons’ urged geographers to go beyond a rather one-dimensional perspective on what transport geography had given aviation research (and see its evolution in, for instance, Pirie 2017), feminist geographers have explored the intersectionalities of the flying experience and the inequities of flight, especially in regards to the (re)production of labour and sexual violence. Political geographers have explored the geopolitics of airspace, airshows and the embodiment of being in the air, and of course the voluminous/volumetric geographies of the drone. As ‘Flying Lessons’ anticipated, mobilities research and other animating concepts have brought flight into a broader, deeper and thicker geography where we are able to better account for what goes on above and in tandem with the ground.

Our new cuts or trajectories explored here, in bodies, infrastructures, technologies and disruptions offer a much more interconnected and, we might add, fragile yet also agile geography of flight. Geographers, far better attuned to more vulnerable ideas of subjectivity, more intimate and complex engagements with geopolitics, more socially diverse and intersectional experiences of structural inequalities, and multispecies, atmospheric, affective and elemental geographies, are well placed to explore these rapidly changing landscapes threaded through with bodies, infrastructures, technologies and disruptions. Some of this, perhaps, had culminated in the response to the pandemic, and its rapid reorganisation and recovery. Assertions of aviation’s dominance and embeddedness in our daily lives were, in part, what made it so vulnerable to a disease which relied upon its many integrated networks to move so quickly. High-tech ways of managing airspace became superfluous against the collapse of global passenger demand. While aircraft were grounded, drones flew surveillance missions to track unwitting sightsee-ers in the countryside. Flight’s contradictory landscapes came to a head. Yet, what might have appeared to be a final boarding call for aviation in the early days of 2020, or aspirations for grand social change towards flying-less, has not materialised. COVID-19’s occurrence helps us realise a new geography of flight. Now is time for boarding a far more entangled complex and indeed convoluted and ambiguous human and more-than-human aerial geography which consists of relations that are highly geographically patterned or differentiated, as well as performing or constituting weaker forms of agency and power. So far, flight’s reappearance reasserts the will of capital and political force, the urge and necessity to move quickly and over long distances, despite its many contradictions.

What seemed clear, stable and complete about flying is both refuted and reasserted. Like a sky with many shades, future research should examine how aeromobility evolves and is entangled in new ways with each crisis, contradiction, consideration, and care. Innovations are repeatedly hatched, solutions foregrounded and knowledge showcased. Flying has become more and more sophisticated, yet frictions, gaps, injustices, violences and harms keep returning flight to another round of questions that we are primed to ask and test. In the futures of aeromobilities research, geographers could benefit from curious inquisitions into what drives society’s seemingly incurable addiction to, apprehension of and realistic alternatives to flight. Our call is not one to record again its disparate facets and forms, but to attune to the deepest desires, fears, ambitions, social schisms and apathetic plundering of the earth that, together, cause flight to land where it has.