The Flying Dialogues

Technology and Culture, 2004

2018

Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935-2012. Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni, eds. Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2013. 1-7.

This essay looks at the ways in which the legendary Australian aviator P.G.Taylor's aviation writing responded to the cultural poetics of flight and the celebrity of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith in the 1930s.

Textus, 2005

Nacelles, 2018

The case of René Fonck is exceptional. The pilot became an ace late in May 1917 but his military performance soon earned him attention in the French press. He was nicknamed “Guynemer’s avenger”, the “invincible boche killer”, “knight of the sky”, and the modern sportsman; in other words, he was identified in the general newspapers whereas industrial modernity was impersonal. Elected a “député-aviateur” after the war, Fonck extended his aspirations with repeated successes. As a public figure, he seemed to fly over common people and triggered the imaginary of flying, still in the making. Although it later became a weapon, aviation first incarnated constant progress and fascinated the public in the 1920s. However, Fonck’s missed attempt to fly over the Atlantic on September 1926 revealed his limits, which were relayed by the press. The hero now shown as a mere mortal was defeated. This article aims to analyze the way the French press crafted the figure of Fonck from an aerial imaginary that was touched by the absolute.

American Aviation Historical Society (AAHS) Journal, 2017

This article, while having historic interest, introduces the reader to a potentially valuable service for supporting research. Researchers are sometimes stymied when they find material in language they are not fluent in. With the expansion of the Internet, many original sources are now available online, including those from foreign countries. Fortunately, organizations like Google have developed and made available free of charge tools that will translate documents from one language to another – an invaluable aid to researchers by providing them access to documents they may otherwise have had to ignore simply because they couldn’t translate them. While these tools are not perfect, particularly with respect to technical terms, they are often more than sufficient for one to gain a clear understanding of the document’s content.

TheGeorgia Review, Vol. 50 (Summer 1996), No. 2, pp. 267-296

Essay tracing the history of the human fascination with flight in literature and other documentary sources and the desire to achieve human flight through technological experimentation and innovation.

Close Encounters in War Journal, 2022

The advent of aeroplanes during the Great War gave birth to an unprecedented form of interrelation between the human and the machine. Like cavalrymen, who had to be expert riders before becoming soldiers, pilots were supposed to master their machines before they could fly them into battle. Therefore, their military drilling included engineering, mechanics, flying theory, and aerial tactics as well as shooting practice. However, as the pilots began to take part in the battles public interest more and more focused on the romantic aspect of flying and duelling. Unlike infantrymen, who barely managed to see their opponents, the pilots were able to engage their adversaries in close-range duels over the trenches, thanks to the technological means of the aeroplane. Thus, the new ‚aerial cavalry‛ depicted in papers and posters and the heroic figures of aces soon became instruments of propaganda. The crude reality of flying and fighting aboard the fragile and often unreliable planes emerges, instead, from the memoirs of the pilots, who were both fascinated and terrified by that new technological warfare. This paper will compare a number of memoirs of pilots from different countries (e.g. Baracca, Bishop, Collishaw, Fonck, Immelmann, Mannock, McCudden, MacLachanan, Richthofen, Udet, and others) to understand how the new aerial warfare was perceived, elaborated and depicted by those who experienced it directly. It will also analyse the rhetorical strategies that the authors of the selected memoirs used to harmonise the legend of the ‚air cavalry‛ with the harsh reality of newborn warfare, oscillating between wonder and horror. Eventually, the paper will claim that the reference to chivalric honour was only a way to embellish a new brutal form of technological warfare.

2017

The expectation that a novel about a celebrity aviator will romanticise flight and glorify the pilot is a product of the mythologisation of aviation, which this essay understands is a response to the threat of technology and the alienating conditions of modernity. Roger McDonald’s novel Slipstream refuses to reproduce this mythology, expressing a literary aspiration to use the form of the modern novel to explore the entanglement of the subject under the conditions of postcolonial modernity. My argument will develop through three parts. The first section will explore the mythologisation of aviation as a symptom of modernity. The second will examine the ways in which the novel uses its modernist form to call into question the celebrity of the aviator and the spectacle of flight. This part of my argument is indebted to the critique by German philosopher Martin Heidegger of the technological mode of Being. Finally, I take up the postcolonial implications of the Heideggerian critique in a country in which many of modernism’s standard antidotes to the problems of its century are compromised by the legacies of colonialism.

“Aeronautical imagination and the figure of the French aviator in the Azorean press (1935/1949)”, in Mélodie Simard-Houde (dir.)., Nacelles. , 2018

In the aftermath of “Atlantic Fever”, several test crews from the most advanced nations in aviation came to the Azores, fighting for the establishment of commercial routes between the Old and the New World. This context explains the 1935 aeronautical mission of the French aviator, Henry Nomy. The analysis of articles in the Azorean newspapers of this period shows the emphasis on the heroic figure of the aviator. In this article, we contrast this aeronautical imaginary with the one prevailing in the Azorean press’ coverage of the accident of the Constellation of Air France, which flew from Paris to New York with a stopover in Santa Maria (Azores) and crashed on the island of São Miguel on October 28, 1949. Studying the articles in these newspapers allows us to grasp a change in the aeronautical imaginary (this time associated with civil aviation): the admiration previously focused on the aviator was now focused on the aircraft itself. http://revues.univ-tlse2.fr/pum/nacelles/index.php?id=674