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Imperial flying was not just about machines, timetables and routes; it was also about ideas, values and practices. This book focuses on the way airborne mobility itself expressed imperialism. Imperial Airways projected an idealised Britain to the Empire, and interpreted and refracted the Empire to Britons. Passengers in commercial aircraft had adventures in the early days of Empire flying, in a mild way, fleeting, organised overnight stops at foreign places. Writing about and publicising imperial flying in the 1920s and 1930s created the first caricatures of Empire aviation. Words and images about long-distance air journeys, aircraft, landing grounds, passengers, crew and landscapes were necessarily selective and partial. Amy Johnson, in a BBC broadcast, said Great Britain was ready to make a decisive bid for world supremacy in the air. Wealthy people were the passengers (acronym 'PAX' in current airline parlance) on scheduled civil aircraft services in the 1930s on routes between England, Africa, India and Australia. The flying crew and ground staff personified the values of their employer and the Empire. Making the public 'airminded' was certainly part of deliberate acculturation in late imperial Britain; Imperial Airways tapped the Empire for publicity. The virtual mobility, presented by the 1930s texts and images, were enjoyed by earthbound readers and viewers. However, the first life of Empire aviation ended in 1939. In the past six decades, Empire aviation has been actively re-imagined and reincarnated as historical subject, hobby, and period artefact and icon.
parts of the British Empire as a commercial airline passenger. The London–Paris and Italy–India section of Imperial ’s air route west of India had been open for two years; more or less regular air service to the Cape and Australia started in 1932 and 1934 respectively. Beforehand, several private flights had been made across the Empire on routes surveyed and first flown in late 1919 and early 1920. The
these routes in the 1920s and 1930s, airline passengers enjoyed the sensations of speed, independence and discovery. In some cases they saved time. It was even possible to recover time, gazing down on and revisiting in quick succession imperial sites from antiquity. Inland from dominion and colonial coasts, aircraft exposed flyers to other British imperial landscapes and cultures. Aircraft left no permanent
state within the jurisdiction of which they reside cannot or will not do so. If we understand humanitarian intervention in this meaning, one state might send a small military unit into the territory of another to accomplish some quite limited task – as the Israelis did in Uganda in 1976, in the raid on Entebbe, to free airline passengers being held hostage there. 11 Tailoring the case to the concerns of this book, one might equally imagine a small force being sent into one country from another, with the purpose of rescuing a group of people from a notorious torture
territory of another to accomplish some quite limited task – as the Israelis did in Uganda in 1976, in the raid on Entebbe, to free airline passengers being held hostage there.11 Tailoring the case to the concerns of this book, one might equally imagine a small force being sent into one country from another, with the purpose of rescuing a group of people from a notorious torture facility in which they were being brutalized, and of destroying it. As far as I can see, such an action would fit the definition of humanitarian intervention given above, and yet, being a small
, after all, was directed at private pilots rather than airline passengers. Africa would not distinguish between them. The article amounted to a survival manual for air crash victims. Most passengers would have been alarmed by the prospect of coming down in remote, arid scrub, or in a vast marsh, and having to endure scorching heat, ‘murderous nomads’ and frightening insects and beasts
are situationally confined, hedged about with restrictions, and the limits to their duration determinable in advance. They are also freely and knowingly entered into for reasons that preserve or extend freedom (and well-being) in a longer or wider purview. For example, airline passengers enter planes voluntarily and with an understanding of the constraints customarily involved in doing so, although these are not negligible: airline staff may direct and prohibit specific behaviours (they may, for instance, tell people where to sit and what not to drink) and even have
economy. CORSIA does not aim to reduce emissions from current levels, nor to restrict demand for flights in the future. It merely aims to deploy market measures to ensure that any growth in the number of airline passengers or flights from 2020 onwards is theoretically carbon-neutral. Technological and efficiency improvements also sit alongside trading the right to pollute; ICAO currently aims for a 2% improvement in efficiency, year on year. CORSIA forbids double counting: for example, India might sell permits to offset
airline passengers.5 The important point about these tactics is that they operated below the official public discourse of the New Labour government and the UK state. The latter would have been publicly embarrassed to be persistently associated with the making of these kinds of accusations and yet they directly benefited from their construction and dissemination. The New Labour government, for its part, relied exclusively on the discourse of sustainable aviation to justify and garner support for its policy of airport expansion. The notion of sustainability was often used
, new threats have emerged. These included the ship hijacking incidents in the SCS, notably when the tanker MT Orkim Harmony was boarded by Indonesian pirates in June 2015 and Vietnamese maritime authorities were mobilised to respond. Also, Vietnam was prompted to respond in March 2014 when Malaysia Airline passenger jet MH370 was first reported missing over the SCS. Notwithstanding these new emergent challenges, it is clear that Vietnam remains preoccupied with the SCS disputes, and this shapes its long-term defence planning. Since May