Designing the Single European Sky: Territorial Prototypes in 20th Century Civil Aviation

After 1942, twentieth-century powered flight's reach exploded, achieving global operation. One spatial byproduct of this change was the abstraction of the seemingly continuous sky into a worldwide system of classified airspace volumes. As a four-dimensional system of borders, airspace continues to serve as an essential spatial technology in the monitoring and choreography of international aviation. However, as seen in the planning efforts to integrate commercial drones into cities, the concepts and practices first developed for international flight are now being re-scaled for the drone's imagined performance: imploding these concepts and practices for drone mobility's velocities, densities, and elevations. Discussions of technologies like drones often privilege the nature and performance of the device itself while failing to account for its attendant contingencies. Histories of powered flight, as an example, have prioritized its vehicles rather than the iterative creation of airspace. This paper constructs a prehistory for the commercial drone by focusing on the latter condition, here understood as excavating territorial prototypes from the history of 20th-century aviation. These historical turning points demonstrate a movement from 'air sovereignty' – whereby nation-states claimed the sky as an extension of their territory by conceptually extruding their borders – toward 'air logistics.' This latter-day condition created a form of post-national territory whereby individual states have ceded control of parts of their domain to accelerate the free circulation of things. Undertaking a historical discussion will provide a lexicon of concepts and practices critical for interpreting current planning to integrate drone mobility and freight into the city.