Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture (review)

One of several new studies inspired by the centennial of flight, A. Bowdoin Van Riper's Imagining Flight addresses the shifting meanings that aircraft and the enterprise of flight have held for the American and European publics over the past century. Van Riper mines a broad range of material in which popular attitudes are revealed: books, movies, television shows, advertisements, and, to a limited degree, the genre of aviation and space art. It is an ambitious project, if not an entirely original one. The responses to aviation he examines fall into well-worn categories: aircraft as transportation, aircraft as military instrument, the pilot as hero, aircraft as emblem of the future. Readers familiar with the work of Robert Wohl, Joseph Corn, Tom Crouch, Dominick Pisano, Howard McCurdy, and Roger Launius will find themselves on familiar terrain, particularly with regard to material from the first half of the twentieth century.

In his introduction, Van Riper addresses some of the limitations inherent in his approach. He explains that "this is a small book about a big subject, intended as an introduction to a variety of topics rather than an in-depth study of any one of them" (p. 8). He goes on to acknowledge that he has "written as if'the public' was a single, homogenous entity," and provides a disclaimer about the book's ambitions, stating that "it is not . . . intended as a definitive study of those perceptions [of aircraft] in any nation, time period, or culture form—not even those (the United States, popular fiction, and film) that are covered in comparatively greater depth" (p. 9).

Nevertheless, he makes the most of the broad historical and cultural sweep of Imagining Flight. Previous studies of the airplane's cultural impact have been more limited in scope. Van Riper's comparisons of different national attitudes toward flight over the course of a century take on an interest of their own. It is instructive, for example, to juxtapose German, British, and American views of the pilot as a heroic figure. In this context, German enthusiasm for gliders after World War I becomes an intriguing form of resistance to the limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles—an observation Van Riper draws from Peter Fritzche. It is also interesting to see, as Van Riper points out, how robust and consistent futuristic dreams of space-faring airplanes proved to be during the twentieth century.

To a large degree, what Van Riper's book lacks in depth it makes up in breadth. He has marshaled a vast range of material to describe public perceptions of the airplane. This includes an essay by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (previously discussed by Corn), movies such as Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, literature such as Joseph Heller's Catch-22, articles from popular magazines, and advertisements. As rich, and sometimes surprising, as such material is, it is generally deployed rapid-fire, with several works lumped together to make a single point.

Van Riper's commitment to incorporating contemporary attitudes toward the airplane and flight enables him to weave his narrative around the effects of the events of September 11, integrating the attacks into discussions of the airplane as weapon and the airplane as mode of transportation. One unfortunate oversight, however, is Van Riper's failure to note the conclusion of Concorde service in 2003, a landmark event with obvious significance for this study.

The value of Van Riper's book derives from his ability to cover a wide swath of material succinctly. Imagining Flight will introduce readers new to the field of aviation history to material that has great relevancy for the history of technology in general. Indeed, Van Riper consistently seeks to broaden the lessons to be drawn from the history of the popular reception of aircraft by drawing parallels with other historical episodes, such as the increasing power and efficiency of weaponry from the fifteenth century through the early twentieth. Giving due recognition to the work of other scholars to whom...