Affairs: Aviation / Global
As geopolitical tensions rise, how free is the sky?
Conflicts in the Middle East, Europe and beyond have reshaped the world’s airspace, making much of it off-limits. We find out how airlines are negotiating the new faultlines on the aeronautical chart.
In his book Skyfaring, Belgian-American writer and pilot Mark Vanhoenacker notes that while aviation is “commonly associated with the levelling of difference, with the bulldozing of borders between places and times and languages”, it has also “resulted in the creation of new realms of geography”. The “administrative divisions of airspace” are not the traditional global demarcations that we might recognise. Rather, writes Vanhoenacker, they are “sky countries” – regions governed by air-traffic-control authorities, with borders and histories of…
