Grounding Aviation Knowledge: Pan American Airways’ Airfields as Sites of Knowledge Production and Transfer

By the late 1930s, Pan American Airways operated a total of 250 airfields across Latin America and the Caribbean. The presentation zooms into the microcosms of these airports, fueling stations, as well as emergency landing sites. Focusing on the 1930s and 1940s, it explores processes of knowledge production, transfer, and contestation in their construction and operation. On these sites, dispatched engineers and aviators from the United States found themselves in unfamiliar environmental and climatic conditions and had to conceive practices to protect both their bodies and their airplanes. The overwhelming majority of staff, on the other hand, was recruited locally, being assigned tasks such as guarding facilities, clearing landing strips, or operating fuel pumps. Understanding airfields as “contact zones” (Mary Louise Pratt), the presentation examines the interactions of these different actor groups. Detailing which sets of knowledge and practices the U.S. airline’s agents could “import” and which they had to generate locally, it sheds light on the role of Latin American workers as producers and gatekeepers of knowledge, including adaption strategies to climatic conditions, knowledge on weather phenomena, and practices of tinkering. Because repairing aircraft was often difficult on the scene, Pan American Airways’ engineers were also forced to make occasional use of local tools and artisanship. Illuminating these different processes of knowledge adoption and adaptation on the micro-social level, the presentation demonstrates that local actors in Latin America and the Caribbean, those people usually identified as immobile and often being prohibited from entering an airplane, were of the utmost importance for establishing Pan Am’s system of intercontinental air routes.