Flying Away: Civil Aviation and the Dream of Freedom in East and West

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