It's a bird! It's a plane! An aerial biopolitics for a multispecies sky

Abstract

Bird strikes were catapulted into headline news in 2009 when US Airlines flight 1549's engines ingested a flock of Canada geese and lost all power, leaving the pilot no option but to ditch into the freezing cold Hudson River. Although everyone on board survived, thousands of birds were killed in the years that followed in attempt to redress aviation safety concerns. This article follows the story of Flight 1549 and considers the different stages of bird strike prevention at a variety of sites: the factory, the airfield, the sky and the accident aftermath. Drawn from empirical research and grey literature analysis of aviation safety documents, it unpicks the various assemblages that are formed at each site and how they are gathered together through inhuman air forces. Situated within theories of biopolitics, it moves beyond a materialist analysis of the solid and the visible and attends to the immateriality of air and its elemental properties which are integral to both life and death. Through an analysis of the aerial as a socio-material spatial categorisation, it considers bird strike management within a multispecies perspective by examining the frictions and entanglements of both human and non-human agency that are generated by differential air spaces. By highlighting the different forms of biopolitics produced by the aerial, it shows how configurations of life shift in relation to the dynamic and unpredictable inhuman forces of air, and how aviation safety practices attempt to harness these forces.