Peter Svik - Civil Aviation and the Globalization of the Cold War

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This book would not be possible without the kind help which I have, over years, received from Kiran Klaus Patel, Wolfram Kaiser, Olaf Mertelsmann, Robert van der Linden, Helmuth Trischler and Wolfgang Mueller. I am also indebted to the Estonian Science Foundation, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Gerda Henkel Foundation, Deutsches Museum and FWF-Austrian Science Fund for providing me with long-term financing necessary for carrying out this book project. I am also grateful to my mother-in-law who had aided me with some translations from the Russian. My special thanks go to Alan Dobson for his first-hand comments and suggestions as well as language editing. The book also greatly profited from critical feedback I received from series editors, Effie Pedaliu and John Young, and anonymous peer-reviewers. At Palgrave, I would like to thank Molly Beck, Maeve Sinnott, Joseph Johnson and Azarudeen Ahamed Sheriff for taking care of this book and kind assistance with all technicalities. At the same time, I feel necessary to absolve all persons mentioned above from any responsibility for the content and eventual mistakes which, despite all efforts on my part, critical reader may eventually find in this work.

Some minutes later it snarled its ponderous way up to the control tower and stopped, looming over the buildings and dwarfing everything about it. Conventional airline stairs which were brought up and fully elevated got nowhere near the passenger doors. A narrow 10ft ladder, let down by the crew from the forward door, just made contact; and down this stairway from heaven, after a time, came thirty or forty Russians, including Mrs. Tupolev.

Writing from the 1959 Paris air show, the journalist regarded the demonstration of the new Soviet long-range liner as a crowning event of the whole fair.

Albeit rather troubled by the necessity to exit the plane in an un-dignifying way and one far away from normal protocol by an on-board emergency ladder, which connected with the standard stairs in mid-air, a bulky Mr K enjoyed the triumph. Unlike during the 1955 Geneva Summit when his plane looked like an insect next to the planes that delivered Dwight Eisenhower , Anthony Eden , and Edgar Faure , four years later he flew to America non-stop, aboard the largest passenger plane of the day.

It was a perfect promotional storm and demonstration of power. In todays globalised world of open skies and mass air travel carried out by super-jumbos like the Boeing B-747 or Airbus A-380 , much of the power allure which planes used to have in the past has now vanished. In the end, in an environment of ever-increasing oil prices and ever stricter environmental regulations because of the global warming, more mundane matters govern these days rather than aviation challenges. To borrow a famous headline of Bill Clinton s 1992 US presidential campaign now its the economy, stupid.

However, while the connection between the prestige, the fascination [with aeroplanes] and the national interest might have weakened, it was at the heart of why international civil aviation [became] a serious problem in international relations. None of the published studies has, however, studied civil aviation affairs from a larger EastWest perspective, nor have the authors approached their respective research from a consequently transnational or global viewpoint.