After the end of World War II, civil aviation expanded very fast. Its success was partly based on technical progress achieved in the context of military aviation during the War but also on the growing need of ordinary people to travel faster, further and more comfortably. This expansion was accompanied by a radical change in collective imagination: airplanes were no longer bomb carriers but the key to potentially unlimited mobility, to long-distance travelling and materially as well as symbolically to the rise of a new jet set. Aviation brought about a new world which Walter Kirn, in his 2001 novel Up in the Air, describes as Airworld: a closed universe with distinguished social, aesthetic and economic rules.

For Kirn, Airworld is ‘the scene, the place, the style.’ It is the world of glamour, passions and news, a ‘nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency – the token economy of airline bonus miles that [he has] come to value more than dollars.’

During the twentieth century Airworld turned into a large projection screen, becoming an integral part of our cultural production and perception. Not only has it generated airports, airplanes, and a society of travellers; it has also generated a utopian space, a dreamworld shaped by the longing for freedom and success translating as mobility.