Law of the Air

Passing Cloud by Tiago Barros

2012-01-12T01:34:00.000+02:00

The spirit of the Zeppelin recently inspired Tiago Barros, an architect from New York who also worked in Beirut and Abu Dhabi, to propose his "Passing Cloud" concept for a New york competition.

Mr. Barros wrote in his proposal:

This project envisions a distinct approach towards moving around the United States being also a revival of the act of traveling. Why traveling at high speed? Why having the final destiny always defined? And why always departing and arriving on a tight schedule? Nowadays, everything is set and everyone is always running around. It is time to reconsider the act of traveling and start enjoying it accordingly.

The Passing Cloud is an innovative and environmentally friendly method of transportation that doesn’t require expensive steel tracks or concrete highways. It is made of a series of spherical balloons that form the shape of a cloud. Its inner stainless steel structure is covered with heavy weight tensile nylon fabric. During the journey, It moves according to prevailing winds speed and direction at the time of travel. Since it moves with the wind, no wind is ever felt during the trip, offering the passengers a full “floating sensation”.

It’s an unique journey. The feeling of floating in the atmosphere – on top of a cloud – with an open schedule and unknown final destiny. All National Ground would be potentially covered at virtually no cost and the help of the wind. The journey becomes your destiny.

The competition was thinking along other lines. In its prospectus, the Van Alen Institute requested

...visions of the architectural design community, planners, graphic designers, artists—anyone who wants to contribute to the discussion surrounding high-speed rail.... projects and narratives picturing the wide-ranging impacts that a new transportation network will have on the nation’s communities, whether urban or rural, rail-riding or car-centric, heartland or borderland. By collecting these ideas and images of a transformed America—be they specific, pragmatic, or speculative—we’ll better understand the hopes and fears of our current moment and be better equipped to decide whether and how we build this new infrastructure.

We at Law of the Air applaud Mr. Barros for his submission. While his contribution did not win, it reminds all of us to slow down, contemplate, and savor life and, as he writes, "sensation." Not sensational speed--sensation when it is most pregnant with reality, when we are calm, present, and floating in the air.

Links:

The competition: http://www.vanalen.org/projects/competitions/LifeAtTheSpeedOfRail
About Tiago Barros: http://cargocollective.com/tiagobarros/#2122936/Tiago-Barros
Passing Cloud website: http://cargocollective.com/tiagobarros#1993960/Passing-Cloud

Paper cuts in the air

2011-11-10T06:53:00.000+02:00

Béatrice Coron is a papercutter artist who produces elaborate, multi-layered stories.

In her TED talk she displayed a paper cut with flying houses and said,

What if we were living in balloon houses? It would make a very uplifting world. And we would leave a very low footprint on the planet. It would be so light.

I love her focus on storytelling. Look closely, you will see people farming the free earth, while the houses raise and lower elevators, drop anchors, and other people parachute down. Coron also produced a paper cut called "Floating Islands."

Of course, real airsteading houses would not look like this, but her art is so beautiful and relevant.

Links:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/beatrice_coron_stories_cut_from_paper.html

Imaginary Flying Cities

2011-08-15T21:07:00.002+03:00

Stephanie of WebEcoist.com collected a dozen inspiring flying and hovering dwellings from the architectural and science-fiction literature. My favorite, of course, is Fuller's Cloud Nine.

Buckminster Fuller’s Cloud Nine

(image via: steve dejonckheere)

Buckminster Fuller always had big ideas, including a massive floating city that would have housed 6,000 residents off the coast of Tokyo. The inventor of the geodesic dome imagined taking his spherical creations into the sky with ‘Cloud Nine’, an airborne habitat composed of free-floating or tethered spheres, each one mile in diameter and housing thousands of people. These spheres would function as hot air balloons, and residents would get back and forth with solar-powered aircraft.

Fuller's idea, of course, is passively floated on renewable streams of solar-driven heat differentials. The below is not as clear:

Migrating Floating Gardens

(image via: rael san fratello)

As green space has gone from ground level to rooftops in urban areas, at least one architect believes they’re due to go higher still. Rael San Fratello imagines ‘Migrating Floating Gardens’, trailing from large remotely controlled floating aircraft that would move around the city and even migrate seasonally to warmer locales.

The Floating House from Pixar’s ‘Up’

(image via: wired)

How many balloons would it really take to lift a house? In Pixar’s ‘Up’, a huge bunch of balloons was simply tied to the fireplace grate through the chimney. Keeping in mind that this is a fictional animated film, Wired did the calculations to determine whether balloons could really lift a house. Their conclusion: it would take 105,854 balloons, each measuring three feet in diameter, to make a 100,000 pound house buoyant.

In another post, Stephanie wrote about wandering cities such as:

Water Station

(image via: cgi society)

Another entry in the CG Society NVArt artspace competition is ‘Water Station’ by Steve Bjorck, who says of his creation: “The planet is hot and dry. The only water left is hidden deep under the dead crust. This nomadic colony tap into ancient wells scattered across the planets surface with a large, floating station similar to Earths oil and gas platforms. This well has a healthy supply of fresh water, they will be able to stay here for many months, maybe years.”

Superstar: A Mobile Chinatown

(images via: dezeen)

Chinese architecture firm MAD isn’t exactly pleased with New York’s Chinatown, calling it a sloppy, kitschy, outdated tourist trap. What could bring it up to date? Oh, maybe making it a bizarre star-shaped mobile city that can take the latest and greatest of Chinese food, inventions and culture to other cities around the world. ‘The Superstar’ is a self-sustaining city that grows its own food and recycles all of its waste so as never to be a burden on its host cities.

This one would be more interesting as a tensegrity:

Stacked City Portable Urban Shelter

(images via: import.export)

A different kind of ‘portable city’ makes it easy to create a home no matter where you go. The Stacked City camping tower by Import.Export is a long way from primitive tent camping, giving travelers an otherwise unattainable view of their surroundings and making them anything but low-profile. As Dornob points out, there are security issues to be addressed, but designs like these could be the turning point for real-life mobile dwellings that go far beyond recreational vehicles.

The website also reported extensively on floating cities here, here and here. A shame Michael Burt's floating Olympic city was not reviewed by them" just published, it is a serious proposal for floating stadia to enable poorer countries to host the Olympics.

Link:

http://webecoist.com/2010/09/13/sky-cities-12-hover-homes-flying-urban-designs/?ref=search

Museo Aero Solar Flies in Roskilde

2011-06-23T22:05:00.002+03:00

The world's only passive flight museum is taking phlight once again. From the festival website:

Help build a huge hot air balloon

We are going to build an hot air balloon of used plastic bags. The balloon goes in the air at this year's Roskilde Festival.

At this year's festival you can look forward to Museo aero solar, a flying museum in the shape of a huge solar-heated balloon made entirely of recycled plastic bags. It is a do-it-together project that explores new ways of thinking energy and space. In three simple maneuvers plastic bags are cut, pasted and decorated into a giant balloon that can float only with help from the heat of the sun.

The construction of the big balloon starts at the National Gallery of Denmark on 21-22 May when all Roskilde-goers are invited to a workshop. The event is free. Just bring all your used plastic bags.

The project was initiated by Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno. In the cross field of art, science and architecture, Saraceno presents visions of the solution to humanity's social and environmental problems using alternative, sustainable patterns of living in the skies above us.

The balloon goes up during the festival

During the festival's warm-up days (June 26-29) you are invited to Art City at Agora M where the balloon will be finished. The balloon is launched during the festival every morning at sunrise from 30 June to 3 July. One hour before sunrise the balloon is spread out on the ground and filled with air from large ventilators. When the sun rises, the air inside the balloon is heated and it goes upwards.

Museo aero solar is presented by the National Gallery of Denmark.

Links:

http://roskilde-festival.dk/uk/news/singlenews/help-build-a-huge-hot-air-balloon/

Seasteading

2010-10-29T08:54:00.003+02:00

"Law of the air" fans have a lot to learn from our friends at sea. So we consider today "Seasteading." That is the term Patri Friedman coined for his project, creating “land” that can float on the ocean, out of bounds of current borders. This aim is very similar to our aim, to create dwellings floating in the air.

Brian Doherty summarized the status of Seasteading in 2009. He attended theirconvention and wrote,

I am struck by how few would-be seasteaders have actual nautical experience, as opposed to lots of clever ideas about flotation, breakwaters (to protect floating domiciles from waves, including the dreaded, superpowerful “rogue waves”), and transportation of seastead-sized objects. One attendee—Mikolaj Habryn, who works for Google—tells me hetook a sailing course out of his interest in the topic, but for the most part these are not people with saltwater in their veins. They are computer types, social and physical engineers, and visionaries who for various reasons think experimenting with new social forms is an exciting challenge. Many of them tell me they are not likely to be early adapters living on small-scale experimental seasteads; instead they plan to wait until the business environment offshore has room for their careers, or until the comfort level for landlubbers rises a bit.

This lack of high-seas experience might be just fine. While ocean living creates unique challenges and costs—Friedman refers to these as the “ocean tax,” recognizing that seasteaders must eventually make the cost lower than the “government tax” you suffer on land—most prospective seasteaders think the obstacles can be largely overcome through money and thought. Human beings already know how to generate power on isolated locations off the grid. Wind, solar, and diesel strike Friedman as the most obviously feasible, and the ocean will probably provide a particularly suitable environment for wind power. Although seasteads probably will try to grow their own food, it can be shipped in if needed; the ocean is all about moving big things cheaply.

What about that most time-tested vessel for living on the sea: the boat? Modularly connecting the vehicles into larger communities seems tricky. Friedman’s ideal seasteading community can start small, grow marginally as the idea or the techniques improve enough to attract more people, and be able to both expand and contract as social experiments succeed or fizzle in the judgment of each individual seasteader. He fears boats don’t provide much room for self-sufficiency in food and power, let alone comfortable long-term living, given their space limitations. Finally, he’s leery of the “Just useboats!” line of thinking because ships are simply too old-fashioned to capture the visionary imagination in the way he thinks seasteading must if the movement is to thrive. Still, Friedman has been moved enough by the obvious immediate advantages in cost and proven legal status to think that living on retrofitted old ships might be a reasonable starting point for experimenting with his ideas.

Oil platforms, another existing model of ocean living and working, are cost-effective because they extract a valuable commodity. But seasteaders cannot, and don’t expect to, begin with resource extraction. That would certainly run afoul of both the Law of the Sea Treaty and any number of existing government and corporate interests that claim to have a say over how ocean-based resources should be used and allocated. For the same reason that taking over existing land is a bad idea for nascent seasteaders, anything that suggests a challenge to existing wealth and authority could hobble the movement while it’s still trying to find its sea legs.

Indeed, this aspirationally lawless bunch muses throughout the conference in Burlingame over the extent to which the world would view all seasteaders as a part of the same team, and thus whether seasteads would have to, gulp, police each other to prevent one bad apple from spoiling the bunch. They do not reach a conclusion.

Seasteaders do have a legal adviser: Jorge Schmidt, an attorney who has experience with the Law of the Sea Treaty. Schmidt is careful to tell me there are plenty of unknowns awaiting future floaters, although he approves of Friedman’s basic framework: get your seastead out of the 12-mile range that countries claim full sovereignty over, don’t mess with resources in the 200-mile exclusive economic zone that most nations also assert, and emulate existing ships in international waters by arranging with some nation to obtain a “flag of convenience” marking seasteads as under its protection. In open waters, only nations have rights. Individuals without a stable flag are considered pirates and outlaws.

The seasteading project benefits from the fact that many poorer countries are willing to sell their sovereignty to the highest bidder in a flag-of-convenience process that works to the buyer’s advantage. “I definitely think at the start those countries will want a cut [of whatever economic benefit a seastead produces], but keep in mind we’re in a good negotiating position,” Friedman says. “We can talk to every country in the world and only need one to give us the deal we want, and we can have them bid against each other for how low the cut can be.”

Schmidt speculates that full sovereignty might never happen for seasteads, but that it might not matter. “Maybe we’ll get 95 percent of what we want just paying Tuvalo,” he tells me. “If that’s the case, why go the extra step?” Reality is nine-tenths of the law: “What’s most important is to get things running, to have something concrete that works. Once we have that, the actual dynamics fuel themselves, rather than expectations and theory.”

Seasteading is currently considering life on ships, as opposed to anchored off-shore drilling platforms. This vision is closer to ours of un-anchored domiciles bobbing on the atmosphere's waves.

The passive air-dwelling community can learn a lot from these seasteaders--perhaps they will teach us to become airsteaders.

Links

Seasteading Institute, http://seasteading.org/

Seasteading in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading

Reason.com article by Brian Doherty discussing Seasteading and its political aspects: http://reason.com/archives/2009/06/08/20000-nations-above-the-sea/print

RSS feeds

Press Releases (RSS) - Low volume feed of our most important announcements.
Main TSI blog (RSS) - News, links, and ideas of interest to the seasteading community, including TSI announcements.
Engineering TSI blog (RSS) - Technical links and progress reports on our engineering efforts.
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom (RSS) - This TSI-affiliated blog focuses on the political implications of competitive government.

Flying Solar Bag

2010-10-14T22:14:00.002+02:00

Created by SteveSpanglerScience.com The Solar Bag measures 15 meters (50 ft) long and 74 cm (29 in) in diameter. The thin, black plastic bag holds over 60 cubic meters (200 cubic ft) of air. Simply fill with air by running, tie off the ends, and let the solar energy of the sun heat the air inside the bag. Within minutes, the bag rises to the sky and floats like a giant solar sausage.

Video:

Links:

http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/product/1358

Hybrid Air Vehicles

2010-10-05T06:09:00.005+02:00

Hybrid Air Vehicles are making exciting progress. The LEMV will implement their technology. Horatia Harrod at the Telegraph wrote a good summary of state of the art air ship technology, below.

At Cardington Airfield, just south of Bedford

, two vast corrugated steel hangers tower over the surrounding area. More than 800ft long – the length of almost three football pitches – and 190ft high, they are the heroic relics of the once great British airship industry.

Eighty years ago, two mighty vessels, the R100 and the R101, were housed in these great metal behemoths

; incredible ‘lighter-than-air aircraft’ – with customised silver and crockery, Axminster carpeted smoking rooms and portholed cabins – that were designed to sail noiselessly across the Atlantic like aeronautical cruise ships.

Further down the road, housed in a far less spectacular stack of Portakabins, is a group of engineers who a

re convinced such airships can take to our skies once more. Hybrid Air Vehicles has built a scale prototype of what will soon be the largest flying vessel in the world – a huge balloon made of ultra-lightweight, super-strong polyester on top of a hovercraft landing system. If it works, it could change the future of flight.

Which is why, when you bear

in mind the company’s grand plans, the Portakabins seem so incongruous. They’re only a temporary home but they make the outfit look a bit, well, amateurish. Someone who finds them more than usually annoying is Gordon Taylor. He is the company’s marketing man, a softly spoken but fastidious Canadian in a pink shirt, chinos and a red tie covered with frolicking dogs. A wayward tuft of hair gives him the air of an eccentric professor.

For the past 13 years, Taylor has been fighting a battle with investors, governments and the general public over the perception of the airship. ‘I’ve never seen a more peculiar industry than ours,’ he says as he leads me through the makeshift office on a bright mid-June morning. ‘There are more nutcases…’ He sighs and sips at his mug of Lady Grey. ‘You get what we call “the giggle factor”. People laugh at lighter-than-air vehicles and the guys who make them: the “helium heads”. It’s taken a long time to overcome that.’

The problem, Taylor admits, is that an airship has a deceptively simple, cartoonish appearance. It looks like a blobby thing with a motor, ‘a party balloon with bits on’, as Mike Durham, the heavy-browed, sardonic chief engineer puts it.

‘We’re regularly sent unsolicited proposals telling us how to build airships,’ Durham says wearily. ‘They’re either from 85 year-olds who were once engineers in the pencil business, or little design companies who think they’ve had a brilliant new idea and this is how it should be done.’

This may not sound like a serious problem, but it is. Fred in his shed in Hertfordshire isn’t likely to put forward a proposal to the Government to build a new aeroplane, because big companies like Airbus and Boeing are so well established. But he, and dozens of other mad inventors, will merrily deluge the Government with their ideas for a marvellous new airship. It makes the industry look silly and brings the credibility of the whole business into question, which in turn frightens away would-be investors.

Airship amateur hour is especially frustrating for the team at Cardington because they’re in the process of creating something that absolutely could not be sketched on the back of a beer mat. And Taylor is most particular about the nomenclature of the new development: it’s not an ‘airship’, he says, it’s a ‘hybrid air vehicle’.

‘It’s a new vehicle. It’s a hybrid because we’re combining helium lift, aerodynamic lift, a hovercraft landing system and vectored thrust,’ he says. ‘If you can get beyond the word airship – because that has a lot of history – people think about them differently.’

Taylor struggles to keep the team on-message about the new name: ‘I’m a right pain in the a--- about it,’ he says. Not everyone is convinced that ‘hybrid air vehicle’ will catch on. For one thing, it isn’t snappy and for another, the fundamental points of physics that differentiate it from an airship are beyond the grasp of most mulish lay people. As Dave Burns, the company’s steely-eyed Scottish test pilot, says wryly: ‘If it’s called an airship that’s a lot better than it could be called.’

Whatever you want to call it, the new technology has just won the company (or rather, their US defence contractor ally Northrop Grumman) a contract with the United States Department of Defence to the tune of half a billion dollars. In just 12 months the team at Cardington must build a 300ft-long surveillance vehicle capable of staying airborne for 21 days at a time. It will be known as the LEMV (Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle).

The LEMV will hover above Afghanistan at 20,000ft, equipped with the sort of super-powerful cameras that can read a signature on a letter from four miles away. It will be, Taylor says, ‘an unblinking eye’, recording every move made on the ground. In theory, no one will be able to plant a roadside bomb – a device which has claimed the lives of so many British soldiers – without the cameras seeing who did it and, more importantly, where they came from. And, if the LEMV is a success, it could prove to be a tipping point, ushering in a new age of airships.

When I first spoke to Taylor over the phone he gave a seductive account of what long-distance travel might be like in a SkyCat, the civilian version of the airship that the company has designed.

‘Imagine you’re with 400 of your best friends,’ he said, almost convincing me that I had 400 best friends. ‘You go to Richmond Park International. At 11 o’clock on Thursday you get on board the SkyCat200. There are hundreds of staterooms on it and you dinner dance your way across the Atlantic. At two o’clock on Friday afternoon you’re getting off at the East River in New York. You’ve travelled 3,000 miles overnight and there’s no jet lag.’

Ever since the first hot air balloon took off in Annonay, southern France, 227 years ago, the sky has rarely been empty of dirigibles, sources of great wonder and fear to their earthbound watchers. The earliest hydrogen balloon took off from the Champ de Mars in Paris in 1783. When it touched down 45 minutes later in a field beside the village of Gonesse, terror-stricken townsfolk tore it to pieces with pitchforks and scythes.

Next a sheep, a duck and a cockerel were sent skywards, then men. Francois Pilâtre de Rozier was aboard the first manned flight in November 1783. Less than two years later, he was dead, plummeting to earth after an explosion aboard a balloon powered by a fatal combination of hot air and flammable hydrogen.

It was almost 100 years later before the first true airship – an engine-powered navigable balloon – lifted off. Henri Giffard, another pioneering Frenchman, attached a steam-driven winch to his balloon in 1867 and set in motion another century of aerial innovation. People experimented with airships powered by foot pedals and propellers and electric motors. Some were killed, but the idea of the airship was always compelling enough to survive.

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin founded his eponymous company in 1896. With him, the age of the giant airships began and, in Germany, zeppelins became something of a national obsession. They seemed to possess an almost mythic power: like ‘fabulous silver fish’, said Dr Hugo Eckener, head of Zeppelin from 1917, ‘floating quietly in the ocean of air.’

In 1937, though, the spell was broken. On May 6, the Hindenburg zeppelin arrived at Lakehurst, New Jersey, after an Atlantic crossing it had made many times before. However, on this occasion there was one key difference: the United States had refused to supply the swastika-adorned airship with helium, so it was filled instead with hydrogen. As welcoming cameras rolled it was suddenly consumed by fire, stripped to a skeleton in a blazing instant.

A description by one radio reporter went around the world: ‘Get out of the way!’ he screamed into his microphone. ‘It’s burning, bursting into flames! This is terrible! It is one of the worst catastrophes in the world! Oh the humanity! Those passengers! I can’t talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest, it is a mass of smoking wreckage.’

With this disaster imprinted on the public consciousness, the long winter of the popular airship began. The unofficial motto of the modern airship industry could be, ‘Don’t mention the Hindenburg!’ When talk turns to the crash, Mike Durham dares me to think counter-intuitively: ‘If you don’t write about it, you will set yourself apart as the only journalist to have done that,’ he says.

Gordon Taylor takes another tack, trying to put things in perspective. ‘Just remember that the Hindenburg happened at around the time of the Titanic. But they didn’t have a camera on the Titanic, did they? Think about that when you look around the QE2,’ he says. The Titanic comparison is much loved, and every person I speak to at Cardington makes it.

Even before Hindenburg happened, a long shadow already lay over the British airship industry. Standing by the hangars at Cardington facing south, you see the land undulate ever so slightly, rising to the meanest of hills. On its maiden voyage in 1931, His Majesty’s Airship R101, a colossal vehicle almost 800ft long, barely cleared those hills.

Preparations for the inaugural flight had been hastily made and the ship was leaking large amounts of hydrogen. The R101 managed to make it across the Channel, but then bad weather started to close in. At 2.08am on October 5, when it was around 40 miles north of Paris, it hit high ground and crashed, killing 48 people.

Some 40 years later, a young naval architect named Roger Munk found himself in possession of a book called The Millionth Chance. It was an account of the events leading up to the crash of the R101. (When Lord Thomson, the head of the air ministry, was asked whether he thought anything could go wrong with the airship’s flight he answered, ‘But for the millionth chance, no.’)

Munk died at the beginning of this year at the age of 63, but he is integral to the story of the hybrid air vehicle. After he read that book, in 1971, he went to meet Lord Ventry, who had been a passionate advocate of airships for decades. He sketched out all the problems that Munk would have to conquer to make the vessels viable and that’s what Munk spent the next 40-odd years doing.

His efforts made him the father of modern airships. Today, nearly everyone who works at Cardington talks about Munk’s almost evangelical belief in the technology.

One of those admirers is senior aerodynamicist Ken Nipress. According to Taylor, Nipress is ‘exactly what you might think an aerodynamicist looks and acts like: a boffin’. Slight of face and frame, his thick glasses and thatch of hair make him look like an unusually wiry owl. His manner is that of a typically matter-of-fact Yorkshireman. ‘We like what we do,’ he says, ‘and we think it has got a future.’

In a rectangular white marquee, I am shown that future; a 50ft-long, roughly oblong balloon pumped up with helium. This is the LEMV prototype. A faint plasticky smell comes off the balloon’s synthetic, off-white skin. Every 10 minutes or so a machine that sounds like a vacuum cleaner whirrs into life, topping up the pressure inside the oblong. Lying in the marquee it looks like a sick whale on a respirator.

But, as Taylor and Durham have already made clear: appearances are deceptive. The technology behind the prototype is massively complex. The calculations it takes to work out the flow of air around a hybrid air vehicle are almost too Byzantine for a computer to process.

‘We’ve got an office full of guys who’ve all come out of the aircraft industry and we need every ounce of their brainpower to design these,’ Durham says.

The material used for the ‘envelope’ (the balloon) is ultra-lightweight, UV-proofed, super-strong polyester. The shape is engineered to provide its own lift – the air that rushes over the curved top of the vehicle creates a vacuum that pulls the whole thing up. It flies with fibre-optic controls, which turn physical steering movements into light signals that pulse down thin strands of glass and tell the rudders which way to steer. It takes off and lands with vectored thrust and a hovercraft landing system, so there’s no need for a ground crew to lasso the vehicle back to earth. It’s fuel efficient and, indeed, it could run with virtually zero CO2 emissions.

When I ask Dave Burns, the taciturn test pilot, what it feels like to fly in an airship, he turns poetical. ‘It’s just, it’s a feeling of freedom. And the detail you can see: you can fly over the field out there a hundred times and see different things every time.’

In strong, windy weather, it moves like a ship on a rough sea. Gusts of wind affect it as little as a flea biting an elephant. An airship is a dynamic, almost organic thing. It breathes. Ballonades expel and take in air as the vehicle rises and falls, allowing for the expansion and contraction of the helium. Although EU regulations mean that seat belts are compulsory on the vehicles, it’s a smooth ride.

There’s a niggling worry I have about the LEMV squatting over Afghanistan: surely a giant white balloon will be vulnerable to attack, despite its lofty position? Fortunately, that’s something they’ve thought about a great deal at Cardington. Indeed, they’ve been thinking about it for many years now, because they also designed ships that were to be deployed over Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

At that time they tested a full-sized airship against a range of artillery including a Russian mounted machine gun filled with .22 calibre armour-piercing incendiaries and a SAM-7 surface to air missile. What they learnt was this: the airship is almost invincible to attack. Helium is an inert gas, so it doesn’t explode.

The pressure inside the envelope is so low that when a hole is made, say by a bullet, air seeps out slowly rather than rushing out catastrophically. Missiles need something hard to connect with if they’re going to explode, but an airship is accommodating, not hard-shelled. The material has the flexibility of a plastic bag; make a hole in it and it almost immediately shrinks inwards.

And what of helium, the scarcity of which damned the Hindenburg? If lighter-than-air vehicles were to become a regular form of transport, would any country be in a position to monopolise the new resource? Could helium wars, commanded by squeaky-voiced generals, break out?

Taylor thinks not. Helium is a major component of our atmosphere, but its tiny particles are hard to get a grip on. One day we may develop the technology to extract it from the air (although, Taylor adds, ‘not in my lifetime and not in my son’s lifetime’). Until then there are massive naturally-occurring stockpiles of the gas in the US, Poland, Russia and Canada. Recently, a huge reserve of helium was discovered in the Gulf state of Qatar. Currently, the lighter-than-air market uses only two per cent of all the helium bought in the world. Most of that is used to blow up party balloons.

One other supposed impediment to the development of the airship has been its relative lack of speed. ‘If you go to an air force, you get pilots,’ Taylor says. ‘Pilots like to fly fast things that go zoom and boom.’ But that macho prejudice doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for the stately globetrotting airship. The hybrid air team have speculatively mocked up grand interiors for such vessels, which could be competitors to the great ocean liners.

Realistically, SkyCats would be most useful in the transport of heavy loads – the largest SkyCat can carry up to 200 tons – to harsh environments, like the Arctic territories of Nunavut. ‘The average age there is 21,’ Taylor says, ‘and it’s got the highest suicide rate, highest drug rate, highest sickness rate in Canada by a long shot. They’ve got nothing – this vehicle will save their lives.’

For now, the men of Hybrid Air Vehicles must work at frightening speed to deliver their LEMV to the US government. Taylor expects the team to expand to almost three times its existing size.

Roger Munk used to say that the sheds at Cardington weren’t much use for anything other than airships or giraffe farming. Soon, perhaps, the team he assembled will bring airships back to their rightful home.

Links:

HAV, http://www.hybridairvehicles.net/

The article, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7918762/Airships-a-second-age.html

More on LEMV, http://www.theengineer.co.uk/in-depth/the-big-story/meet-lemv-the-first-of-a-new-generation-of-advanced-military-airship/1003418.article

Open Letter to David Blaine

2010-09-14T10:32:00.002+02:00

Dear David Blaine,

I nominate you to be the world's first atmonaut, to open a new frontier of human imagination and striving: a new city in the sky.

You are the best qualified for this post. You hold endurance records in small enclosure, low temperature, low oxygen, low nutrient and high cost environments. You dwelled in a coffin for a week, lived frozen in a block of ice for three days and nights, slept in a hypoxic tent for weeks, lived in a suspended glass box without food for 44 days, held your breath for more than 17 minutes--and you produced all these deeds for prime time television viewing. Wow.

But all that was prelude to your inaugural atmonautic phlight, your internship in life aboard a passive sun-powered flying sphere, bobbing between layers of atmosphere, floating above the ground, passing over borders in that great Appalachian trail in the sky. You will be an inspiration to young and old from every nation. The message will be clear: magic is real. We can live, work and sleep in the air, and leave the ground to what it does best--growing food and nurturing life.

David Blaine floats in a glittering bubble, like Glinda the good witch from the South of Oz in her bubble ship, but behind the magic is a deeper message: People do not require concrete boxes and asphalt roads to raise their families and achieve their dreams. We can take to the sky on a whisper of solar heated air.

Conquering new frontiers is a basic human passion. You were born in 1973, four years after Neil Armstrong's moon walk, so you did not experience the race to space as I did. But let me tell you, the entire world was breathless since 1957 when Laika, the first dog in orbit, sent her beating heart telemetry rate back to our eager listening ears.

This new frontier will also capture the world's hearts and minds. Unlike your 44 days in a glass box in London, you will float over borders and pass people in their homes, offices and fields. Your support and publicity teams will have to clear international permissions, like Bertrand Piccard's team. But he could control his height, choosing jet streams with impunity. You will be at the mercy of the ocean of air. Much more dramatic.

And you will be cold and hypo-oxygenated. But you have experience with those conditions. After all, you were frozen in a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York City. You experimented with ultra-cold again in your race to set the world's record for breath holding, inspired by the 1987 story of the boy that fell through ice and was trapped under a river...

I promise, the Science Times and the New England Journal of Medicine will cover the story. And when more and more passive flying atmonauts join you, flying over green fields of earth growing food and pure water for the sustenance of all life, when infants born in the bobbing cities in the sky delight over the fresh fruit and fish from a daily harvest free of urban runoff, they will ask: who pioneered this last great frontier? Who was the first to break tether with the earth?

The answer, for all time, will be the greatest magician that ever lived, David Blaine.

= = =

Do your part! If you know someone who knows someone who knows David Blaine, please forward this link: http://bit.ly/davidletter

Cloud 9 Facebook Group

2010-08-03T16:47:00.003+03:00

David Erskine-Zilbert and other Cloud 9 fans created a Facebook group, "Cloud 9 Tensegrity Sphere - Can It Become a Reality". Some interesting people are members, like the leading Italian tensegrity expert Biagio Di Carlo.

I joined.. Will you?

Link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=56432020790&ref=search#!/group.php?gid=56432020790

Physics discussion of Cloud 9 type spheres

2010-07-09T12:31:00.003+03:00

Fuller contended that, as the sphere gets larger, the temperature differential of hot air within the sphere would enable it to passively fly.

Formula for calculating the mass supported by such a sphere of air (as a function of temperature, height and radius) posted by "Cannon":

Here is a concise version of the discussion:

Cannon: As a sphere gets bigger, the volume it encloses grows much faster than the mass of the enclosing structure itself. Fuller suggested that the mass of a mile-wide geodesic sphere would be negligible compared to the mass of the air trapped within it. He suggested that if the air inside such a sphere were heated even by one degree higher than the ambient temperature of its surroundings, the sphere could become airborne. He calculated that such a balloon could lift a considerable mass, and hence that 'mini-cities' or airborne towns of thousands of people could be built in this way. These 'cloud nines' could be tethered, or free-floating, or perhaps maneuverable so that they could 'migrate' in response to climatic and environmental conditions.

I came up with a formula for calculating the mass supported by such a sphere of air (as a function of temperature, height and radius), and just wanted to see if my math checks out. Also, since the air pressure is the same inside as out, would there be any feasible way to pressurize such a system?

IttyBittyBit: Indeed, a large enough sphere could be used to build a floating city. Also, as a sphere gets bigger the mathematics of heating it up works out to be more and more economical. However, there is the issue of pressure difference. A sphere built to contain even a small pressure difference might need walls so thick it could end up defeating the purpose. But you don't really need pressure difference or even temperature difference. Just replace the nitrogen in the air inside the sphere with helium. Helium too expensive? Then replace it with hydrogen; but include safety measures so as to avoid super-Hindenburg scenarios.

pallidin: Would anyone really want to live in a floating city that would be an ultimate, and easy, target for terrorists?

Sentis: Yes! It could be fitted with electronic countermeasures and lots of missiles, it could be used to invade enemy territories...

K^2: The stress on the shell, due to buoyancy, is quadratic in radius. The cross-section area of the shell, however, given constant thickness, increases linearly. That means, at some point, you'll have to start increasing thickness of the shell linearly with the size. If you start scaling thickness linearly with the size, the mass of the shell goes up as a cube of the size, same as the mass of enclosed air. In other words, no, it won't work.

Link:

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?s=5630df19020b5a92b3d03b48fa31106c&p=2632108#post2632108

Lessons from Bertrand Piccard

2010-01-21T09:34:00.000+02:00

Bertrand Piccard went around the world in a balloon. His balloon is in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, together with the airplane of Charles Lindbergh with Apollo 11, with the Wright Brothers Flier, with Chuck Yeager's 61. The trip required 3.7 tons of liquid propane.

He shares some lessons with TED, including maps of wind, photos and more. His ballast metaphor is interesting: lighten up to get ahead:

How do we steer a balloon? By understanding that the atmosphere is made out of several different layers of wind which all have different direction. So, then, we understand that if we want to change our trajectory, in life, or in the balloon, we have to change altitude. Changing altitude, in life, that means raising to another psychological, philosophical, spiritual level. But how do we do that?... Well, in a balloon it's easy, we have ballast. And when we drop the ballast overboard we climb. Sand, water, all the equipment we don't need anymore. And I think in life it should be exactly like this... throwing overboard, as ballast, to change our direction.

But his main metaphor relates to the freezing temperatures that you encounter when you float on the wind-lanes. "When I took this picture, the window was frozen because of the moisture of the night. And on the other side there was a rising sun."

Piccard is now working on a solar powered airplane that can store enough power during the day to stay aloft at night.

Links:

TED video, Bertrand Piccard's solar-powered adventure
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bertrand_piccard_s_solar_powered_adventure.html

Website: http://www.SolarImpulse.com

Inflatable Tower

2009-06-12T17:41:00.002+03:00

Incredibly strong inflatable "fabrics", made from kevlar and polyethylene, can be utilized to form immense structures. This is another handy reminder that, as materials like kevlar, buckyball nanotubes and metallic fibers become finely manipulable, today's high tech has a lot to learn from yesterday's textile technology.

Inflatable pneumatic modules already used in some spacecraft could be assembled into a 15-kilometre-high tower.... If built from a suitable mountain top it could reach an altitude of around 20 kilometres, where it could be used for atmospheric research, tourism, telecoms or launching spacecraft. Pneumatic modules already used in some spacecraft could be assembled into a 15-kilometre-high tower. The team envisages assembling the structure from a series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as helium. To test the idea, they built a 7-metre scale model made up of six modules (see image). Each module was built out of three laminated polyethylene tubes 8 centimetres in diameter, mounted around circular spacers and inflated with air.

Inflatable tower could climb to the edge of space.

Compare Unique Heavier-than-air Flight Patterns

2009-03-25T09:50:00.003+02:00

The graphic below enables visual comparison of flight pattern differences between the 10 most active aircraft models being monitored by the FAA on August 12, 2008 over a 24-hour period. It is one of about ten overlapping graphics at the link below. By clicking the buttons on the right, you can toggle images, and check out differences such as range (for example, the Boeing 738 is capable of traveling 3,060 nautical miles in a flight, while the Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ2) at 980 nautical miles is a puddle jumper).

This project was a collaboration between Koblin, FlightView and Wired Magazine.

Source: Wired, compare flight patterns.

Flight Patterns in the USA

2009-03-25T09:41:00.004+02:00

Aaron Koblin, FlightView and Wired Magazine collaborated to produce a series of animations of heavier-than-air vehicle flight over the United States. Below is the Northeast: click the menus at the end to see other patterns.

New York City to add Flight Lanes

2009-03-25T09:26:00.003+02:00

Aaron Koblin's New York Flight Traces captures the flight path of every plane that arrived or departed Newark, LaGuardia or JFK on August 13, 2008.

Wired published this to illustrate an article on the flow of aircraft in and out of New York City.

To help reorganize this airspace, the FAA called on Mitre, a Beltway R&D firm that works exclusively for the government. Mitre's scientists and mathematicians, in cooperation with some of the region's air traffic controllers, are completely rethinking the flow of aircraft in and out of New York City. Current flight patterns evolved like a rabbit warren, with additions tacked on to an existing architecture. As airports grew busier and airplanes started flying higher and faster, that architecture became increasingly inefficient. The plan, the unfortunately named New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Airspace Redesign, aims to bring order to the air.

Think of it as a redrawn map of the roadways in the sky. While planes used to chug in and out of the city on a few packed roads, the redesign spreads out the aircraft by adding new arrival posts (exit ramps), departure gates (on-ramps), and takeoff headings (streets leading up to the intercity highways). But the biggest move will be making the space for all these additions. Mitre's proposal is to extend the boundaries of this airborne city into a 31,180-square-mile area that stretches from Philadelphia to Albany to Montauk.

Source: Wired March 2009, Air Repair by Jeffrey Milstein

Tomas Saraceno

2009-03-15T13:55:00.003+02:00

Tomas Saraceno is the world's most active artist and architect working on life in the air.

Saraceno's Museo Aero Solar is a flying museum displaying the art of nylon bags. A similar solar-powered dome is shown in this video:

Saraceno's Air-Port-City project proposes a floating international city in the sky, kept afloat by solar-fueled Aerogel, the lightest material ever created. His idea is to establish a residential urban district for migrants which is itself migratory, constantly crossing and blurring boundaries. Saraceno wrote,

These habitations would move like clouds, eliminating geographical and political boundaries, generating human and political communities in continuous transformation and re-definition. These airport-cities would be freely constituted in compliance with international laws, challenging the political, social, cultural and military restrictions presently in effect around the world.

Saraceno has been working consistently for many years to realize these dreams. He has designed buildings for airborne habitation, investigated human flight through solar energy and flying gardens, and many visualizations of what life would be like under these airborne conditions.

In conversation with me, Saraceno spoke about the need for "bicycle paths" of the sky. Air traffic lanes are currently dominated by the needs of commercial heavier-than-air aircraft. Solar powered balloonists and other passive flight vehicles play second place to the needs of heavier-than-air aircraft. Saraceno was pleased that this blog began, and plans to support it and contribute in future.

Here is an amateur video of his biosphere:

Some of my summary above based on this report at WorldChanging:
Review of Saraceno Air-Port-City at WorldChanging.com

More links:

Video Game

2009-01-02T14:46:00.000+02:00

To promote passive flight and the Law of the Air, imagine a video game.

The game would have a NASA WorldWinds engine at its heart (WorldWinds has better wind information that Google Earth). The clouds would have real dimension and moisture.

The goal of the game could be to fly from point A to point B (say Munich to Amsterdam).

Thanks to Tomas Saraceno for brainstorming about this idea with me.

X-Prize

2009-01-01T14:37:00.000+02:00

Living in the air is quite difficult. People must be ready to be very cold, oxygen deprived, and tolerate bright sunlight.

To make progress, we need a millionaire to finance a LawOfTheAir "X-Prize."

The first person to live off Earth for two months would win.

The qualifications need some more defintion, of course.

do we require gray water recycling?
can the aeronaut land daily to get food and let out black water?
are there navigation requirements? Or just the need to stay aloft?

Thanks to T. Saraceno for brainstorming about this with me.

Solar Energy Baloons

2008-12-13T19:29:00.009+02:00

Joseph Cory, the environmental architect visionary of Geotectura, with Technion aerospace engineer Dr. Pini Gurfil, developed helium-filled platforms constructed from a fabric coated with photovoltaic cells.

Called Sunhope, the idea is to deploy solar energy-harvesting systems with a low environmental footprint.

The balloons are made to last about a year without no maintenance. Cory and Gurfil estimate that one or two balloons could power a home.

The balloons are easy to deliver and set up. Cory and Gurfil have made prototypes and conducted research. They found that a 10 foot balloon delivers about a kilowatt of electricity (equivalent to 25 square meters of solar panels). Target cost is about $4,000 per balloon, less than half the price of a typical ground-based grid.

This YouTube is Hebrew television coverage, but has Cory speaking English, and shows how the balloon's are constructed.

The idea is a nice innovation over Cool Earth Solar's balloons--theirs are ground based. Each 8-foot-diameter balloon is made of plastic (like that used to bag potato chips), with a transparent upper hemisphere and a reflective lower hemisphere. When inflated, the balloon's geometry concentrates inbound sunlight onto a photovoltaic cell at the focal point. This transparent upper surface protects the cell from the environment, including rain, insects and dirt. A single cell placed in this balloon generates about 300 to 400 times the electricity of a cell without such a concentrator. The balloon is strong enough to support a person's weight, and is tested to withstand winds of up to 125 miles per hour.

Read more: Joseph Cory at Geotectura, Dr. Gurfil at the Technion, Cool Earth Solar

Appalachian Trail In The Air

2008-11-01T14:53:00.000+02:00

Just as the Appalachian trail was cleared across the USA, and bike paths are cleared in cities, LawOfTheAir.com should seek and spearhead the creation of aviation and border-issue-clear lanes for Solar (passive) ballooning.

The hot air balloon community does not work on these issues because it is (1) industrially intensive (2) tourist-oriented. The solar balloon community is smaller and more open to new ideas than the hot-air balloon community. For example, they are providing wind pattern information to NASA.

Humans are ocean faring ever since we were tool-making; but we are airborne for only a few hundred years. We have almost no collective experience or lore about living in the air. Compare this to ocean dwelling--ideas of the doldrums, the storms, the Easterly winds, etc. are in poetry, literature and public knowledge.

A Woman's Place is in the Air

2008-10-20T11:36:00.000+02:00

As I pointed out here, ballooning and passive flight are about persistence, being and nurturing, and not about brute force, loud noise and speed. The former are conventionally construed as women's values, the latter, men's values.

So it is nice to stumble upon an article on women's role in early flight. These women are mentioned:

Sophie Blanchard, took over the balloon business from her husband's Jean-Pierre
Andre Garnerin's niece
Dolly Shepherd, a star of Buffalo Bill Cody's show
Queen Margherita of Italy founded the Roman Aero Club in 1904, and Contessa Grace di Campello Della Spina was an enthusiastic member, calling ballooning the "sport of the gods."
Mrs. Hart Berg, first woman passenger on a Wright Bros. plane
Airplane pilots Blanche Scott, Bessica Raiche, Julia Clark, Harriet Quimby, Katherine Stinson, Bessie Coleman, Beryl Markham..

This is from "Women in Flight," a talk given January 20, 1999, by John H. Lienhard, Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Houston. jhl at uh.edu.

High Altitude Lego

2008-10-19T10:55:00.001+02:00

In July, 2008, balloons carried Lego payloads into the stratosphere. The "High Altitude Lego Extravaganza" was sponsored partially by Lego, the University of Nevada-Reno, National Instruments, and The Energizer Battery Company.

Read more: The official website. Brian Davis's blog.
The Energizer battery spec.

Dawn of the age of phlight

2008-10-19T07:26:00.002+02:00

We live in the dawn of the age of phlight.

What is phlight? It is flight, but spelled with a "ph." Why? Flight today means "fossil fuel" flight, hence the "f;" we are interested in promoting renewable sun-powered flight, hence the "ph" of phlight, standing for passive heliogenic flight. A cloud weighs half a million kilograms yet is suspended in the air by sunlight alone. That is the emblem of phlight; let us say that the cloud phlies.

Flight--with a fossil fuel f--is done today by airplanes, helicopters and rocket ships, and also hot air and weather balloons, dirigibles, blimps, zeppelins--even gliders, since they are pulled by fossil-fuel powered vehicles. All of these rely on fossil fuels, hence they fly and do not phly.

Phlight--passive heliogenic phlight-- is done today by kites, passive solar-powered balloons, and Tomas Saraceno's work such as the Museo Aero Solar and his flying garden. There are also promising experimental solar collectors and kite-like wind generators, but progress is slow.

We envision a day when people sleep, work and phly daily along internationally accepted phlight paths. The slow progress towards phlight is due to the significant challenges that phlight poses. Understanding the challenges is a necessary first step towards finding solutions. The challenges are technological and social.

Phlight requires technological advances in

materials: ultra-light materials like Aerogel to build any rigid structures needed;
fabrics: ultra-thin textiles that can sequester sun radiation, retain hot air or release it as needed. Perhaps buckypaper can help.
suits: the original B-17 passengers wore heated flying suits with oxygen masks to protect them from the -45 degree Celsius cold. We need new such suits for our phliers, perhaps based on mountaineering and arctic gear.
kitchen and toilet: ultra-efficient food preparation and waste evacuation facilities are needed as every gram counts;
GIS: multidimensional maps of the atmosphere are needed; Google Earth-type GIS is a good first step, but that is only the surface of the earth; we need to innovate new methods to map the flows of air that have both depth and breadth.
escape devices: a safety vest is needed for people in phlight, perhaps gas-ejected parachutes.

Phlight requires social and political advances in

path clearing: we need to clear passive phlight paths in the atmosphere, using methods such as those used by Appalachian Trail and bike path activists; these paths require clear political border rights and air rights of passage, keeping in mind the passive and hence less-controlled nature of phlight.
ports of call: Phlight ports need to be created, with a clear idea of what supplies and services are needed at such a port.
motivation: Flight is marked by drama: the rush of speed, the loud noise, the tremendous power, the vicarious thrill of seeing death-defying stunts, the frisson of pilots in military-style dress and stewardesses in short dresses. Phlight is very different: it is a contemplative pleasure like gardening, a union with nature like sailing. (On a hormonal level, flight elicits fight-or-flight adrenaline responses; phlight elicits oxytocin-type responses of endurance, closeness and bonding).

The ocean was first traveled in passive heliogenic sea craft. The earliest seamen innovated a tremendous range of technologies that benefited all humankind, such as star navigation and tension-based sail structures. They must have been crazy, taking to sea on little more than a song and a hope; yet they discovered and populated the world.

Air travel has developed in reverse: first came fossil and carbon-fueled flight (even the first hot air balloons were heated by wood burning). Phlight had to await the high-tech fabrics and portable oxygen needed to enable a human to live in the oxygen-deprived, cold atmosphere. But today events pressure us to take to the skies. Overpopulation and ecological stress motivate humanity to leave the ground and take to the air.

The Graf zeppelin flew over a million and a half kilometers, including a trip around the world, but was retired as it was too slow (90 km/h) and too dangerous (flammable hydrogen). Phlight has different concerns: no need for speed--phlight is about dwelling, not transporting--and no danger--just solar powered air--and no need for such fine steering control, nor tables with linen table cloths.

The first phlying pioneers need to be extremely motivated people, just like the first seaman, and the first pilots. Until these people show up we can plant phlying gardens. We can hoist an atmonaut into a phlying meditation space tethered to the ground. Perhaps an X-prize can go to the first atmonaut to stay aloft for a month, or a year, in phlight. We can begin to request phlight paths from the owners of the jumbo jet superhighways, and we begin to collect the GIS data to comprehend atmospheric flows.

Phlight is a critical step towards easing our planet's burdens. Once achieved, we can begin tearing up concrete and liberate the world-around layer of soil from its asphalt prison, leaving it to do what it does best: make food and support the biosphere. We can achieve humanity's original dream of taking to the skies, not on the back of a roaring engine, but on the caress of a cloud.

- Lionel

Warsaw Convention - A Brief Explanation, Warsaw-Life

2008-03-10T13:12:00.002+02:00

The Warsaw Convention took place in Warsaw, on 12th October 1929. Experts in the field of Aviation Law, from thirty one nations, arrived in the Polish capital to create a legal framework that still binds international aviation today (albeit modified, most notable at the Hague in 1955 and Montreal 1999).

The principal purpose of the Warsaw Convention was to determine the liability of air carriers in the case of an accident, both in regards to passengers and also baggage and cargo. One of the main reasons that the Warsaw Convention needed amending in Montreal was because the maximum compensation that an airline could be forced to pay in the event of an international accident was 75,000 US dollars (for the death of one person). This limit, set to protect a fledging aviation industry from bankruptcy, has now been changed, so that the minimum a bereaved family can claim - without having to prove the airline’s negligence - is 135,000 dollars. And if the carrier is found at fault for the accident... Well, then the sky’s the limit.

http://www.warsaw-life.com/poland/warsaw-convention

Warsaw-life.com 2003-2007
All rights reserved © Lifeboat Limited. UK Registered Company No. 5351515
retrieved 10 March 2008

Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air

2008-03-10T13:10:00.001+02:00

Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air (Montreal, 28 May 1999)

Chapter I - General Provisions

Article 1 - Scope of application

Article 2 - Carriage performed by State and carriage of postal items

Chapter II - Documentation and Duties of the Parties Relating to the Carriage of Passengers, Baggage and Cargo

Article 3 - Passengers and baggage

Article 4 - Cargo

Article 5 - Contents of air waybill or cargo receipt

Article 6 - Document relating to the nature of the cargo

Article 7 - Description of air waybill

Article 8 - Documentation for multiple packages

Article 9 - Non-compliance with documentary requirements

Article 10 - Responsibility for particulars of documentation

Article 11 - Evidentiary value of documentation

Article 12 - Right of disposition of cargo

Article 13 - Delivery of the cargo

Article 14 - Enforcement of the rights of consignor and consignee

Article 15 - Relations of consignor and consignee or mutual relations of third parties

Article 16 - Formalities of customs, police or other public authorities

Chapter III - Liability of the Carrier and Extent of Compensation for Damage

Article 17 - Death and injury of passengers - damage to baggage

Article 18 - Damage to cargo

Article 19 - Delay

Article 20 - Exoneration

Article 21 - Compensation in case of death or injury of passengers

Article 22 - Limits of liability in relation to delay, baggage and cargo

Article 23 - Conversion of monetary units

Article 24 - Review of limits

Article 25 - Stipulation on limits

Article 26 - Invalidity of contractual provisions

Article 27 - Freedom to contract

Article 28 - Advance payments

Article 29 - Basis of claims

Article 30 - Servants, agents - aggregation of claims

Article 31 - Timely notice of complaints

Article 32 - Death of person liable

Article 33 - Jurisdiction

Article 34 - Arbitration

Article 35 - Limitation of actions

Article 36 - Successive carriage

Article 37 - Right of recourse against third parties

Chapter IV - Combined Carriage

Article 38 - Combined carriage

Chapter V - Carriage by Air Performed by a Person other than the Contracting Carrier

Article 39 - Contracting carrier - actual carrier

Article 40 - Respective liability of contracting and actual carriers

Article 41 - Mutual liability

Article 42 - Addressee of complaints and instructions

Article 43 - Servants and agents

Article 44 - Aggregation of damages

Article 45 - Addressee of claims

Article 46 - Additional jurisdiction

Article 47 - Invalidity of contractual provisions

Article 48 - Mutual relations of contracting and actual carriers

Chapter VI - Other Provisions

Article 49 - Mandatory application

Article 50 - Insurance

Article 51 - Carriage performed in extraordinary circumstances

Article 52 - Definition of days

Chapter VII - Final Clauses

Article 53 - Signature, ratification and entry into force

Article 54 - Denunciation

Article 55 - Relationship with other Warsaw Convention instruments

Article 56 - States with more than one system of law

Article 57 - Reservations

Document Information (metadata)

Output generated by SiSU 0.64.1 2008-01-09 (2008w01/3)

Montreal Convention, Wikipedia

2008-03-10T13:07:00.001+02:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Convention

The Montreal Convention, formally the Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air^[1], is a treaty adopted by a Diplomatic meeting of ICAO member states in 1999. It amended important provisions of the Warsaw Convention's regime concerning compensation for the victims of air disasters. The Convention re-establishes urgently needed uniformity and predictability of rules relating to the international carriage of passengers, baggage and cargo. Whilst maintaining the core provisions which have successfully served the international air transport community for several decades (i.e the Warsaw regime), the new convention achieves the required modernisation in a number of key areas. It protects the passengers by introducing a modern two-tier liability system and by facilitating the swift recovery of proven damages without the need for lengthy litigation.

Under the Montreal Convention, air carriers are strictly liable for proven damages up to 100,000 Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), a mix of currency values established by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), approximately $138,000 per passenger at the time of its ratification by the United States in 2003. (As of January 2007, the value has risen to roughly $149,000.) For damages above 100,000 SDR's, the airline must show the accident that caused injury or death was not due to their negligence or was attributable to the negligence of a third party. The Convention also amended the jurisdictional provisions of Warsaw and now allows the victim or their families to sue foreign carriers where they maintain their principal residence, and requires all air carriers to carry liability insurance.

The Montreal Convention also changes and generally increases the maximum liability of airlines for lost baggage to a fixed amount 1000 SDRs (the amount in the Warsaw Convention is based on weight of the baggage).

Montreal convention was brought about mainly to amend liabilities to be paid to families for death or injury whilst on board an aircraft.

EU countries jointly ratified the convention on 29 April 2004, and it came into force in those countries on 28 June 2004.

This page was last modified on 1 January 2008, at 14:40.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Civil Aviation Authority, Wikipedia

2008-03-10T12:46:00.001+02:00

Country	Authority name in English	Authority name in local language
United Nations	International Civil Aviation Organization	n/a
Afghanistan	Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation of Afghanistan [1]
Albania	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Albania [2]	Drejtoria e Përgjithshme e Aviacionit Civil të Shqipërisë
Angola	National Civil Aviation Directorate	Direcção Nacional de Aviação Civil
Armenia	General Department of Civil Aviation [3]	Քաղաքացիական ավիացիայի գլխավոր վարչություն
Australia	Airservices Australia, Civil Aviation Safety Authority	n/a
Austria	Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology [4]	Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie
Bahamas	Department of Civil Aviation of Bahamas [5]
Bahrain	Department of Civil Aviation Affairs [6]
Bangladesh	Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh
Barbados	Civil Aviation Department of Barbados [7]
Belarus	Aviation Department of Belarus [8]	Департамент по авиации
Belgium	Federal Public Service Mobility and Transport [9]	Service public fédéral Mobilité et Transports
Bermuda	Deparment of Civil Aviation of Bermuda [10]	n/a
Bhutan	Deparment of Civil Aviation of Bhutan
Bolivia	General Directorate of Civil Aviation of Bolivia [11]	Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil
Bosnia and Herzegovina	Bosnia and Herzegovina Directorate of Civil Aviation [12]	Bosna i Hercegovina Direkcija za civilno zrakoplovstvo
Botswana	Department of Civil Aviation of Botswana [13]
Brazil	National Civil Aviation Agency of Brazil [14]	Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil
Brunei	Department of Civil Aviation of Brunei [15]	Jabatan Penerbangan Awam
Bulgaria	Directorate General Civil Aviation Administration [16]	Главна дирекция "Гражданска въздухоплавателна администрация"
Cambodia	State Secretariat of Civil Aviation [17]	rdæelxaFikardæanGakascrsIuvil
Cameroon	Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority [18]
Canada	Transport Canada
Cayman Islands	Civil Aviation Authority of the Cayman Islands [19]
China	Civil Aviation Administration of China [20]	中国民用航空总局
Costa Rica	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Costa Rica [21]	Dirección General de Aviación Civil
Croatia	Civil Aviation Authority of Croatia [22]	Uprava zračnog prometa
Cuba	Institute of Civil Aeronautics of Cuba [23]	Instituto de Aeronáutica Civil de Cuba
Cyprus	Department of Civil Aviation of Cyprus [24]	Τμήμα Πολιτικής Αεροπορίας
Czech Republic	Civil Aviation Authority of the Czech Republic [25]	Úřad pro civilní letectví Česká republika
Ecuador	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Ecuador [26]	Dirección General de Aviación Civil
Egypt	Ministry of Civil Aviation of Egypt [27]	وزارة الطيران المدني
El Salvador	Civil Aviation Authority of El Salvador [28]	Autoridad de Aviación Civil
Estonia	Estonian Civil Aviation Administration [29]	Lennuamet
European Union	European Aviation Safety Agency
Fiji	Civil Aviation Authority of the Fiji Islands [30]
Finland	Finnish Civil Aviation Authority [31]	Ilmailuhallinto
France	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of France [32]	Direction Générale de l'Aviation Civile
Gabon	Secretariat-General of Civil and Commercial Aviation	Secrétariat Général de l’Aviation Civile et Commerciale
Gambia	Gambia Civil Aviation Authority [33]
Georgia	Georgian Civil Aviation Administration [34]
Germany	Federal Office for Civil Aviation of Germany	Luftfahrt-Bundesamt
Ghana	Ghana Civil Aviation Authority [35]
Guatemala	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Guatemala [36]	Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil
Guyana	Guyana Civil Aviation Authority [37]
Hong Kong	Civil Aviation Department	民航處
Iceland	Icelandic Civil Aviation Administration [38]	Flugmálastjórn Íslands
India	Directorate General Of Civil Aviation [39]
Iran	Civil Aviation Organisation of Iran [40]
Iraq	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Iraq [41]	المنشأة العامة للطيران المدني
Ireland	Irish Aviation Authority [42]	Údarás Eitlíochta na hÉireann
Israel	Israel Civil Aviation Authority
Jamaica	Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority [43]
Japan	Japan Civil Aviation Bureau [44]
Jordan	Civil Aviation Regulatory Commission of Jordan [45]
Kenya	Kenya Civil Aviation Authority [46]
Kiribati	Civil Aviation Authority of Kiribati
Laos	Department of Civil Aviation of Laos
Latvia	Civil Aviation Agency of Latvia [47]	Civilās aviācijas aģentūra
Lesotho	Department of Civil Aviation of Lesotho [48]
Libya	Libyan Civil Aviation Authority [49]	مصلحة الطيران المدني
Liechtenstein	Office of Civil Aviation of Liechtenstein
Lithuania	Civil Aviation Administration of Lithuania [50]	Civilinės aviacijos administracija
Luxembourg	Directorate of Civil Aviation of Luxembourg [51]	Direction de l’Aviation Civile
Macau	Civil Aviation Authority of Macau [52]	民航局/Autoridade de Aviação Civil
Macedonia	Civil Aviation Agency of Macedonia [53]	Агенција за цивилно воздухопловство
Malaysia	Department of Civil Aviation of Malaysia [54]	Jabatan Penerbangan Awam Malaysia
Malawi	Department of Civil Aviation of Malawi [55]
Maldives	Civil Aviation Department of the Maldives [56]
Malta	Department of Civil Aviation of Malta [57]	Dipartiment ta' l-Avjazzjoni Ċivili
Marshall Islands	Directorate of Civil Aviation of the Marshall Islands
Mexico	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Mexico[http://dgac.sct.gob.mx/	Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil
Moldova	Civil Aviation Administration of Moldova [58]	Administraţia de Stat a Aviaţiei Civile a Republicii Moldova
Mongolia	Civil Aviation Authority of Mongolia	Иргэний Нисэхийн Ерөнхий Газар
Myanmar	Department of Civil Aviation of Myanmar [59]	ေလေၾကာင္းပို႔ေဆာင္ေရးၫႊန္ၾကားမႈဦးစီးဌာန
Namibia	Civil Aviation Authority Of Namibia [60]
Nepal	Civil Aviation Authority Of Nepal [61]
Netherlands	Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management [62]	Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat
New Zealand	Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand
Nicaragua	Nicaraguan Institute of Civil Aviation [63]	Instituto Nicaragüense de Aeronáutica Civil
Nigeria	Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority [64]
Norway	Civil Aviation Authority of Norway	Luftfartstilsynet
Oman	Directorate General of Civil Aviation and Meteorology	المديريه العامه للطيران المدني والأرصاد الجويه
Pakistan	Civil Aviation Authority of Pakistan
Panama	Civil Aviation Authority of Panama [65]	Autoridad Aeronáutica Civil
Papua New Guinea	Civil Aviation Authority of Papua New Guinea [66]
Paraguay	National Directorate of Civil Aviation of Paraguay [67]	Dirección Nacional de Aeronáutica Civil
Peru	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Peru [68]	Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil
Philippines	Air Transportation Office [69]
Poland	Civil Aviation Office [70]	Urząd Lotnictwa Cywilnego
Portugal	National Institute of Civil Aviation of Portgual [71]	Instituto Nacional de Aviação Civil
Qatar	Civil Aviation Authority of Qatar [72]	للهيئة العامة للطيران المدني
Romania	Romanian Civil Aeronautical Authority [73]	Autorităţea Aeronautică Civilă Română
Russia	Federal Agency for Air Transport
Rwanda	Rwanda Civil Aviation Authority [74]
Samoa	Civil Aviation Authority of Samoa
Saudi Arabia	General Authority of Civil Aviation [75]	للهيئة العامة للطيران المدني
Serbia	Civil Aviation Directorate of Serbia [76]	Директорат Цивилног Ваздухопловства
Seychelles	Seychelles Civil Aviation Authority [77]
Singapore	Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore
Slovakia	Civil Aviation Authority of the Slovak Republic [78]	Letecký úrad Slovenskej republiky
Slovenia	Civil Aviation Directorate of Slovenia [79]	Direktorat za civilno letalstvo
Somalia	Civil Aviation Caretaker Authority for Somalia [80]	n/a
South Africa	South African Civil Aviation Authority [81]	n/a
Sri Lanka	Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka
Sudan	Civil Aviation Authority of Sudan [82]
Suriname	Civil Aviation Department of Suriname [83]
Sweden	Swedish Civil Aviation Administration
Syria	Directorate General of Civil Aviation
Taiwan	Civil Aviation Administration of Taiwan [84]	交通部民用航空局
Tanzania	Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority [85]
Thailand	Department of Civil Aviation of Thailand [86]	กรมการขนส่งทางอากาศ
Timor-Leste	Civil Aviation Division of Timor-Leste
Tonga	Ministry of Civil of Tonga [87]	n/a
Trinidad and Tobago	Trinidad and Tobago Civil Aviation Authority [88]	n/a
Tunisia	Office of Civil Aviation and Airports [89]	Office de l'aviation civile et des aéroports
Turkey	Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Turkey [90]	Sivil Havacılık Genel Müdürlüğü
Uganda	Civil Aviation Authority of Uganda [91]	n/a
Ukraine	State Aviation Administration [92]	Державна авіаційна адміністрація (Державіаадміністрація)
United Arab Emirates	General Civil Aviation Authority [93]	n/a
United Kingdom	Civil Aviation Authority of the United Kingdom	n/a
United Nations	International Civil Aviation Organization
United States of America	Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
Vanuatu	Vanuatu Civil Aviation Authority [94]
Venezuela	National Institute of Civil Aviation of Venezuela [95]	Instituto Nacional de Aviación Civil
Vietnam	Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam	Cục Hàng Không Việt Nam
Yemen	Civil Aviation and Meteorological Authority of Yemen [96]
Zambia	Department of Civil Aviation of Zambia [97]
Zimbabwe	Civil Aviation Authority of Zimbabwe [98]

This page was last modified on 28 February 2008, at 16:56.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

International Air Transport Association, Wikipedia

2008-03-10T12:45:00.000+02:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IATA

The International Air Transport Association is an international industry trade group of airlines headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where the International Civil Aviation Organisation also happens to be headquartered, even though they are different entities. The main objective of the organization is to assist airline companies to achieve lawful competition and uniformity in prices.

IATA was formed in April 1945, in Havana, Cuba. It is the successor to the International Air Traffic Association, founded in The Hague in 1919, the year of the world's first international scheduled services. At its founding, IATA had 57 members from 31 nations, mostly in Europe and North America. Today it has over 240 members from more than 140 nations in every part of the globe.

For fare calculations IATA has divided the world in three regions:

South, Central and North America.
Europe, Middle East and Africa. IATA Europe includes the geographical Europe and Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the islands of the Pacific Ocean.

To this end, airlines have been granted a special exemption by each of the main regulatory authorities in the world to consult prices with each other through this body. However, the organisation has been accused of acting as a cartel, and many low cost carriers are not full IATA members. The European Union's competition authorities are currently investigating the body. In 2005, Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Competition, made a proposal to lift the exception to consult prices. In July 2006, the United States Department of Transportation also proposed to withdraw antitrust immunity ^[1]. IATA teamed with SITA for an electronic ticketing solution ^[2].

IATA assigns 3-letter IATA Airport Codes and 2-letter IATA airline designators, which are commonly used worldwide. ICAO also assigns airport and airline codes. For Rail&Fly systems, IATA also assigns IATA train station codes. For delay codes, IATA assigns IATA Delay Codes.

IATA is pivotal in the worldwide accreditation of travel agents with exception of the U.S., where this is done by the Airlines Reporting Corporation. Permission to sell airline tickets from the participating carriers is achieved through national member organizations.

They also regulate the shipping of dangerous goods and publish the IATA Dangerous Goods Regulations manual, a globally accepted field source reference for airlines shipping of hazardous materials.

This page was last modified on 6 March 2008, at 05:08.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Warsaw Convention, Wikipedia

2008-03-10T12:44:00.001+02:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Convention

The Warsaw Convention is an international convention which regulates liability for international carriage of persons, luggage or goods performed by aircraft for reward.

Originally signed in 1929 in Warsaw (hence the name), it was amended in 1955 at The Hague and in 1975 in Montreal. United States courts have held that, at least for some purposes, the Warsaw Convention is a different instrument from the Warsaw Convention as Amended by the Hague Protocol.

In particular, the Warsaw Convention:

mandates carriers to issue passenger tickets;
requires carriers to issue baggage checks for checked luggage;
creates a limitation period of 2 years within which a claim must be brought (Article 29); and
sets a carrier's liability to at least:
- 250,000 Francs or 16,600 Special Drawing Rights (SDR) for personal injury;
- 17 SDR per kilogram for checked luggage and cargo,
- 5,000 Francs or 332 SDR for the hand luggage of a traveller.

The sums limiting liability were originally given in Francs (defined in terms of a particular quantity of gold by article 22 paragraph 5 of the convention). These sums were amended by the Montreal Additional Protocol No. 2 to substitute an expression given in terms of SDR's. These sums are valid in the absence of a differing agreement (on a higher sum) with the carrier. Agreements on lower sums are null and void.

On April 1, 2007, the exchange rate was 1.00 SDR = 1.135 EUR or 1.00 SDR = 1.51 USD.

A court may also award a claiming party's costs, unless the carrier made an offer within 6 months of the loss (or at least 6 months before the beginning of any legal proceedings) which the claiming party has failed to beat.

The Montreal Convention, signed in 1999, will replace the Warsaw Convention system, once Montreal has been ratified by all states. Until then, however, there will be a patchwork of rules governing international carriage by air, as different states will be parties to different agreements (or no agreement at all).

This page was last modified on 4 February 2008, at 16:36.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Kenneth Beaumont, Wikipedia

2008-03-10T12:43:00.001+02:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Beaumont

Major Kenneth Macdonald Beaumont CBE DSO (10 February 1884 – 24 June 1965) is the individual probably most responsible for the development of international aviation law.

Beaumont served in the Army Service Corps in the First World War, reaching the rank of Major and being awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1918 for his services during the capture of Jerusalem.

After becoming a joint partner in 1911 of the London based legal practice, Beaumont and Son, (originally formed as a family practice by his grandfather in 1836) Major Beaumont turned the practice's focus to aviation law following an Imperial Airways accident in 1924. He was one of the three original legal advisers on the IATA (International Air Transport Association although it was then called the International Air Traffic Association) Legal Committee and served in this capacity from 1925 to 1946. In the early part of his career at the IATA he was responsible for drafting the terms and conditions for passenger tickets, baggage checks and consignment notes for cargo. In 1929 Major Beaumont attended, as an observer on behalf of the IATA, a conference in Warsaw at which the Warsaw Convention for the unification of certain rules relating to international carriage by air was drafted. He was instrumental in persuading the conference members not to schedule to the Convention standard forms of tickets, baggage checks and consignment notes.

Major Beaumont was elected Chairman of the C.I.T.E.J.A. (Comité International Technique d'Experts Juridiques Aérien) - soon to become the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) in 1946, of which he was also elected Chairman whilst serving as its UK representative. The terms of his engagement were expressed by Lord Nathan thus:

We understand that you know more about the international aspects of air law than we do at the Ministry. In these circumstances, are you prepared to attend meetings of the C.I.T.E.J.A. on the understanding that you receive no brief or instructions from us and that, if we approve of the way in which you handle these meetings, we shall receive the credit and that, if we do not approve, your employment will be terminated?

He was elected President of the legal committee of the ICAO in 1954. Major Beaumont was the author of a draft Convention intended to replace the Warsaw Convention but although, to his regret, his draft was not adopted, many of its provisions appeared in the Hague Protocol 1955. He retired from the ICAO in 1957, but continued to attend meetings as an observer on behalf of the International Chamber of Commerce and the International Law Association.

Major Beaumont was the co-author of Shawcross and Beaumont, the standard authoritative legal text on aviation.

Although best remembered for his contributions to the field of aviation law, he was also a championship figure skater and served as a referee or judge of World, European and Olympic Figure Skating Championships. He served as the President of the Royal Philatelic Society, London, and of the National Skating Association of Great Britain.

His family motto was: "Cartun pete finem" (Seek a sure end)

This page was last modified on 10 January 2008, at 12:54.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Avitation Law, Wikipedia

2008-03-10T12:41:00.000+02:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_law

Aviation law is the branch of law that concerns flight, air travel, and associated legal and business concerns. Some of its area of concern overlaps that of admiralty law and in many cases, aviation law is considered a matter of international law due to the nature of air travel. However, the business aspects of airlines and their regulation also fall under aviation law. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), governs applied aspects of flight. In the international realm, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) provide general rules and mediates international concerns to an extent regarding aviation law. The ICAO is a specialized agency of the United Nations.

In the United States and most European nations, aviation law is considered a federal or state-level concern and is regulated thereby at that level. In the U.S., states cannot govern aviation matters in most cases directly but look to Federal laws and case law for this function instead. Aviation law, however, is not in the United States held under the same Federal mandate of jurisdiction as admiralty law; that is, which the United States Constitution provides for the administration of admiralty, it does not provide such for aviation law. Space law, which governs matters in outer space beyond the Earth's atmosphere, is a rather new area of law but one that already has its own journals and academic support. Expectedly, much of space law is connected to aviation law.

This page was last modified on 8 March 2008, at 01:47.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

The Law of the Air by Arnold Duncan McNair

2008-03-10T12:33:00.000+02:00

The Law of the Air by Arnold Duncan McNair, Michael R. E. Kerr, Robert A. MacCrindle
The University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1957), pp. 111-112

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042-0220(1957)12%3A1%3C111%3ATLOTA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

Air and Space Law, Peace Palace Library

2008-03-10T12:30:00.002+02:00

http://www.ppl.nl/100years/topics/airandspacelaw/

Air and Space Law

Space dog Laika.

Air Law and Space Law are disciplines in international law of quite recent date. At the same time, however, they cover the Carnegie Foundation's first century. After the Wright brothers successfully launched the first plane in 1903 the twentieth century became an era in which the significance of the power driven aircraft was only to grow. The rise of commercial aviation diminished global distances. The discovery of outer space (Sputnik in 1957, dog Laika in 1958, Yuri Gagarin in 1961, Apollo 11 on the Moon in 1969) added a fresh element. With the International Space Station under construction, Space Law has become a defining legal aspect of our age.

Air Law, history, scope and definition

It is rather remarkable that air law preceded the actual technology involved. Air law was being formulated even before the Wright Brothers' take off. Paul Fauchille wrote his seminal article "Le domaine aérien et le régime juridique des aérostats" in 1901, in volume 8 of the still young French scholarly journal Revue Générale de Droit International Public founded in 1893. He presented his views at a meeting of the Institut de droit international in Neuchâtel in 1900. Aircraft inthe way the Wright Brothers envisaged it, power driven and navigable, was as yet unknown and unforeseen, and therefore naturally left out of Fauchille's considerations. Within a few years his approach, the general legal framework of air law and its details, mostly concerned with sovereignty over airspace, became obsolete for its lack of realism.

Johanna (Jenny) Francina Lycklama à Nijeholt, De Luchtvaart in het volkenrecht ('Aerial Navigation according to the Law of Nations').

Dutch interest In the Netherlands the first doctoral thesis on air law, by Johanna (Jenny) Francina Lycklama à Nijeholt,De Luchtvaart in het Volkenrecht ('Aerial Navigation according to the Law of Nations'), was published in 1910. Like all pioneers she compared air law with the legal regime of the seas. Was air a 'mare liberum'? Was air a 'res nullius'? Is air free without limitations, free except for certain sovereignty rights of the ground state required in the interest of self-preservation, e.g. limitations up to the height of 1000 m? Is there a lower zone of territorial airspace or do ground states have exclusive rights to the superincumbent air column, with the addition of a servitude of innocent passage for foreign non-military aircraft?

Legislating air In the Paris Convention of 1919 the complete sovereignty regulation was formulated in Article 1 and the still valid 1944 Chicago Convention worded the innocent passage element. National interests prevailed after the First World War but in 1920 the battle for the freedom of the air was fought and legally settled.

In an appendix in Lord A.D. McNair's The Law of the Air (1964) reference is made to the history of the maxim (uncommon, of course, from a Roman Law point of view) "cujus est solum, ejus est usque ad coelum et ad inferos" ("Whosoever has the soil, also owns to the heavens above and to the center beneath"); the maxim's current meaning is brought about by 20th century air traffic.

In the United Kingdom Shawcross & Beaumont compiled a loose leaf publication that has been continuing until today, entitled, quite simply, Air Law. In France we find Marcel Le Goff's Manuel de droit aérien, droit public (1954) and Maurice Lemoine's Traité de droit aérien (1947). In Germany at the Institute for Air and Space Law in Cologne Karl-Heinz Böckstiegel is the leading figure in the field.

The Dutch tradition was continued in the second half of the twentieth century by the Utrecht University professor Isabella Henrietta Philepina Diederiks-Verschoor. She became a prominent scholar of international reputation. Professor Diederiks-Verschoor is best known for An Introduction to Air Law and her Introduction to Space Law.

Because of issues closely related to air law, like airport security, air piracy, hyjacking, terrorism (cases such as KAL 007 and Lockerbie), air law is considered as one of the focal topics in international law. Fare bargaining and landing rights, noise, pollution and influence upon rural and urban planning touch international law.

Tanja L. Zwaan, Space Law.

Space law, a Cold War phenomenon? Tanja L. Zwaan, then co-director of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University, started her contribution to Space Law: Views of the Future (1988) with the following statement: "Too many publications dealing with outer space law start with the words: 'After the launching of the first Sputnik in 1957...'" ("The Influence of the Achievements and Failures of the Past on the Future of Outer Space Law"). Other scholars, however, trace the origins of space law to as far back as 1934, when Eygene Korovin, professor of international law at the Institute for Soviet Law in Moscow, published his article on the international legal aspects of the stratophere, "La conquête de la stratosphère et le droit international" in Revue Générale de Droit International Public (vol. 41, pp. 675-686). Korovin is seen as the father of scientific international space law in the Soviet Union. With surprising clairvoyance he foresaw that aviation in outer space ('stratosphère‘) would develop along the same lines as in the lower air layers: "Expérience scientifique et sportive d‘abord; instrument de guerre ensuite, et, enfin moyen perfectionné de commerce international" (p. 677). He concludes by relating the conquest of airspace to the problems of international security (p. 686).

In space law once again legal regulation, or at least preparations for formalization, preceded technology. Space law developed into a topic which was to be covered frequently by Soviet researchers in Russia and its satellite states. Manfred Lachs from Poland, Judge, later President at the International Court of Justice, published The Law of Outer Space: An Experience in Contemporary Law-Making in 1972. He advises to use analogies creatively and follow the most progressive tendencies in international law for the definition of the scope of space law (p. 21). In Chapter XII, 'The Law-Making Process', Lachs opposes the presumption that outer space had been "a lawless area or legal vacuum" since it had always been subject to international law (p. 135). The book is based on Lachs's lecture at the The Hague Academy of International Law, published in Recueil des Cours, 1964, pp. 1-116, 'The International Law of Outer Space'.

G.P. Zhukov, International Space Law.

Soviet interest, Soviet interests Undoubtly the Soviet interest in space law relates to the Cold War, to East-West relations, Ballistic Missile Defense Systems, Anti-Satellites Satellites (ASAT'), to SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) or Star Wars, to space war threats, arms race in outer space, military use of space, arms control in outer space, war prevention, demilitarization, disarmament of outer space and détente, and even to the desire for a nuclear weapon-free outer space zone. G.P. Zhukov and V.S. Vereschetin (as well as G.I. Tunkin) reflect the Soviet efforts to prevent war, a world war, an outer space war. They argue in favour of peaceful use of the outer space; they reject a customary international law and natural law to be applied to or to regulate outer space, because in the Soviet view legal relations in outer space have to be in accordance with general principles of international law: opposition against national appropriation of outer space, peaceful coexistence, international cooperation in exploring and using outer space for peaceful purposes.

Gennady Zhukov (with Yuri Kolosov) published International Space Law in 1984, a translation from the Russian original. In 1985 V.S. Vereshchetin, presently Judge at the International Court of Justice, co-authored a book on developments in international law regarding the Soviet programme towards peace. He promoted the peaceful exploration and use of outer space on various occasions, e.g., in the 1986 United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) publication Prevention of the Arms Race in Outer Space. In 1969, the year a small step for man but a giant leap for mankind was taken by Neil Armstrong, Hungarian scholar Gyula Gal published his Space Law. Gal uses line illustrations of vertical projections of state sovereignty over independently moving air and space columns so as to show why unlimited state sovereignty - usque ad infinitum - is incorrect when referring to positive law and to fundamental facts of natural science (p. 67). See also Aerospace Law (1969) by Nicolas Mateesco Matte, pp. 46-47.



The cover of Gal's book and some of the illustrations.

Nandasiri Jasentuliyana, internationally recognized author of the four volume Manual on Space Law (1979) and Deputy Director-General of the United Nations Office in Vienna and Director of the Office for Outer Space, summarized all issues on space and the United Nations in International Space Law and the United Nations (1999): "It was natural that this responsibility to regulate the new environment would fall upon the United Nations, which had been established to ‘maintain international peace and security‘" (p. 1).

Relevant developments towards codification were started by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in 1958. The Outer Space Treaty dates from 1967, an elaboration resulted in the 1979 Moon Agreement in which international use of the moon and exploration of its resources in particular were addressed. In the Moon Agreement the moon deliberately wasn't identified as res nullius, but as a res communis, a res extra-commercium or the common heritage of mankind.

For Grotius the freedom of airspace began beyond the range of a hunter's weapon. Today's space law is one of the newest branches on the tree of international law and follows developments in space technology. The steps defined in 1934 by Korovin appeared to be realistic after all: after the initial stage of adventure came the military involvement during the Cold War and today satellites in outer space are part of the earth' system of television broadcasting, telecommunication and maritime services through INMARSAT etc., and meteorological and other scientific research is performed in or monitored from outer space.

Law of the Air, Carl Zollman

2008-03-09T22:30:00.001+02:00

Written in 1927, published by The Bruce Publishing Co.

Law of the Air, Columbia Encyclopedia

2008-03-09T22:29:00.000+02:00

See http://www.questia.com/library/encyclopedia/air_law_of_the.jsp

in the broadest sense, all law connected with the use of the air, including radio and satellite transmissions; more commonly, it refers to laws concerning civil aviation. The development of large-scale air transport after World War I brought with it the need for regulation, both national and international. In 1919 a meeting of the victorious nations of World War I resulted in the International Convention for Air Navigation, commonly called the Paris Convention. The convention recognized the sovereignty of each state over its own air space without prejudice to innocent passage by aircraft of another state. It also provided that each aircraft (like each ship) must have a registered nationality. Rules were adopted as to the airworthiness of aircraft and the certification and licensing of pilots. The United States was among the 33 signatory nations but did not ratify the convention; nevertheless U.S. air laws were modeled on it. The Warsaw Convention on International Carriage by Air (1929) determined that the owner or operator of the carrier is liable for any injury, death, or property damage. World War II emphasized the need for sounder regulation of international air transport and for uniformity of equipment, laws, and regulation. An international civil aviation conference of 52 nations, not including the USSR, met in Chicago in 1944. There was much discussion of the "five freedoms of the air"—freedom to fly across the territory of a state without landing; freedom to land for nontraffic purposes; the right to disembark in a foreign country traffic from the country of registry of the aircraft; the right to pick up in a foreign country traffic destined for the country of registry; and the right to carry traffic between two foreign countries. The first two were accepted, but the fifth was bitterly opposed; only the first two were included in the International Air Services Transit Agreement, which was generally signed. The convention set up a provisional body that in 1947 became the International Civil Aviation Organization, affiliated with the United Nations. There have been several general conferences since the Chicago Convention and many bilateral agreements have been concluded by parties to it. In the United States, deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s led to the eventual dissolution of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Since 1984, U.S. air laws have been administered by the Federal Aviation Administration, a division of the Department of Transportation. The successful launching of satellites necessitated the development of space law.

____________________