Sky as Frontier: Adventure, Aviation, and Empire (review)

Courtwright surveys American aerospace developments and their global consequences throughout the last century. He argues that the "sky," by which he means activities in the atmosphere and in outer space, has constituted a frontier similar to the one that Turner first described more than a century ago.¹ Although Courtwright does not pursue his frontier thesis consistently or wholly persuasively, he has written an engaging and smart book that will appeal to many.

The frontier analogy works most effectively in "The Age of the Pioneers," the first section of the book, where Courtwright treats the history of flight through Charles Lindbergh's crossing of the Atlantic in 1927. Contemporaries hailed aviators as "pioneers," referred to the "conquest" of the air, and talked of the aerial "frontier." Courtwright deems such "frontier as metaphor" rhetoric largely "superficial" and "a cliché of progress" (7). Like Turner before him, he is more interested in the changing demographic, spatial, and temporal aspects of aerospace frontiers. Invoking the distinction that western historians have made between frontiers devoted to agricultural production, "Type I," and frontiers engaged primarily in mining or extractive industries, "Type II," Courtwright suggests that early aviation and spaceflight were, in effect, Type II frontiers. All of these frontiers shared populations that have been mostly young, male, unmarried, and nomadic; their inhabitants have all willingly assumed considerable risks and often met with violent deaths.

The second section of Courtwright's book, "The Age of Mass Experience," sparkles with insights. His major theme is how, starting slowly in the 1930s and becoming obvious by the 1960s, flying shed its risky, frontier qualities to become routine and almost universal. Passengers who fly in commercial planes no longer present a frontier demographic; they are young and old, black and white, rich and poor—in short, just like people in the country at large. Although Courtwright does not see the aerial frontier as "closed"—"frontier niches" survive even today—he deftly explicates the complex technological changes, business innovations, and regulatory shifts that, by vastly increasing the supply of inexpensive airline seats, conquered the sky (169). Nor does he ignore the increasing demand for air travel. The expansion of higher education in the 1960s, for instance, by adding courses in Western civilization and art to college curricula, developed student appetites for foreign travel. Courtwright rightly observes that "the art history survey was plainly Pan Am's friend" (131).

The book's third and final section, "The Significance of Air and Space in American History," paraphrases the title of Turner's famous 1893 essay. Courtwright notes that conquering the "sky" despoiled the earth, as now virtually no environment on the planet is beyond the reach of flying tourists. Moreover, given its air bases in forty-four countries and satellites in outer space to command and control its land, sea, and air forces, the United States has become a global "empire" of unprecedented power. One way this aerial empire has contributed to the American way of life, Courtwright observes, is that "the automobility Americans enjoyed in the late twentieth century depended on their airmobility" (208). This timely observation is but one of many provocative ideas that Courtwright presents in this worthwhile volume.