Designing the Skies

Airspaces are vast volumetric structures of varying sizes and shapes which exist within the context of a tightly controlled invisible planetary architecture. They are carefully designed to connect countries together, to ensure the safe transit of aircraft, but also to clearly define the parameters of state borders and areas of national responsibility. These complex arrangements of flight corridors, Flight Information Regions (FIR), controlled airspaces, and vast volumes of military training zones combine with a rigorous set of in-flight navigation and communication procedures to ensure safe transit thought the air and safe distances between aircraft. Movement through airspace is also monitored by ground-based primary and secondary radars, and Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) which triangulates an aircraft's position using satellites and other sensors.

This image of Norwegian and Swedish airspace from Google Earth (with 3D modeling by Lloyd Bailey) exemplifies the subdivision of the sky into volumetric structures, and while each nation state on the planet has a unique arrangement of spaces, they all share at least a degree of aerial management and design.

As ‘discrete dimensions absent from political maps’ these volumetric techno-legal zones have precise geographical parameters and altitudes.² They often extend way beyond sovereign borders or oceanic territory and are subdivided into different classes of airspace according to function. While the vertical boundary of sovereign airspace is defined by its land border and can extend 12 nautical miles from its coast out to sea, FIRs may extend hundreds of miles over the open ocean. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) delegates responsibility to individual nations who then monitor and provide air services including Air Traffic Control (ATC) when an aircraft enters and transits through a region. All commercial and private air traffic is required to respond to ATC with a transponder ‘squawk’ code, which historically is a way to identify friend or foe, but which currently allows them to move seamlessly though FIRs and territorial borders to preserve safe distances. This elaborate system of invisible corridors and volumetric borders depends on strict compliance. When objects enter without transponders or clear identification, they not only disrupt the technical order of airspace management but also challenge the very belief in a structured and governable sky. These violations of international aviation regulations have become frequent occurrences across the world as a way for belligerent nation states to provoke and test their adversary’s defensive capabilities.

As a highly effective and precisely defined planetary structure, FIRs interlock like pieces of a spherical jigsaw puzzle, intended to preserve territorial and sovereign integrity while separating the tens of thousands of flights that may be in the air at any one time. With this in mind, it is important to recognise that most deliberate, unresponsive incursions, such as those described above, do not technically breach sovereign airspace but rather violate FIRs. As such, they are generally not considered direct violations of national borders (which would likely precipitate a rapid and potentially lethal response). Instead, such incursions are better understood as ‘projections of power’ designed to probe the defensive capabilities and measure the response time of adversarial states.³

In addition to FIR and other classes of civil airspace, many countries reserve vast aerial volumes for military training and defensive operations such as weapons testing and exercises. Dao and Havlick’s quantitative evaluation of U.S. military airspaces describes the ‘multidimensional extent of spatial control,’ calculating not only the exact size of these volumetric structures but also the frequency and duration of their activation.⁴ Airspace here emerges as an invisible, multidimension zone that can be turned off and on, challenging our understanding of spatial certainty and our shared experiences of land, sea and sky. It amounts to a carefully administered and enacted belief system, wherein pilots and air traffic controllers share instructions and arcane knowledge of invisible walls and corridors that passengers may or may not pass through. It is a belief system, a shared virtuality that keeps thousands of planes in the air every day but one that is inscribed in law and relies on a consensual understanding of space as a socially constructed and technologically instrumentalised entity. This paradox has been extensively described by Adey, Williams⁵, and Kaplan⁶ amongst others. Here, the use of airspace can also be a technology of antagonism, speculative provocation and surveillance, all of which were features of the Cold War between NATO countries and the Soviet Union, and persists to this day in different permutations. However, the institutional belief in airspace (and the orthodoxy of federal and civil regulations) is one that is progressively challenged by ongoing provocative incursions of known and unknown vehicles (mostly military jets and surveillance balloons). When airspace was conjured into existence as a designed entity, when it became an internationally recognised phenomenon after the Second World War with the Convention on International Aviation of 1947 (otherwise known as the Chicago Convention), errant flyers quickly learned the rules. Today, flying has never been safer and air travel between nation states has become a mundane reality of contemporary life. However, the consequence of such an effective infrastructure is an almost total monopolisation and colonisation of the sky, a modern-day spatial enclosure not dissimilar to the process of land privatisation that took place in England between the 15^th and 19^th centuries. Here, the rights to use land for agriculture and subsistence by peasants was withdrawn by wealthy landowners and enforced by various acts of Parliament.

As airspace design became both an extension of national identity (consolidating and preserving borders) and a medium of international cooperation, it also became the means of controlling and withdrawing the sky from public use and ownership. It is notable that from the Elizabethan era until the birth of aviation, property owners could claim the sky above them as their own, a principle of property law known as Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad infero, Latin for "whoever's is the soil, it is theirs all the way to the sky and to the depths.”⁷ Today, the sky is a designed medium, one filled with precisely defined invisible structures. They simultaneously consolidate national security and state borders, and facilitate the expansion of global tourism and the international trade in commodities..

This article considered how we might understand the sky is as a structured phenomenon, but perhaps we could also begin to think how we might liberate the sky from pure utility, from the monopoly of an aviation industry that significantly contributes to global Co2 emissions. Perhaps it is time to think creatively about the skies and assess new forms of mobility and activities that are not depended on fossil fuels and irresponsible models of global trade. After all, the global airspace infrastructure is simply a belief system, and like any other, it can that can be questioned and challenged. Maybe it is time to design a new sky