Flying through code/space: the real virtuality of air travel

Commercial air travel is a key global industry facilitating the complex daily movements of planes, people, goods, and services across the world. In this paper we analyse contemporary air travel through the conceptualisation of a culture of real virtuality. We contend that air travel now consists of passage through 'code/space'. Such code/space includes travel websites, check-in, security checkpoints, flight decks, air-traffic control, immigration, and customs checkpoints, which together form assemblages that define the practices and experiences of air travel. Code/space is qualitatively different to coded space, in which software influences the production of space, in that code and space are mutually constituted-produced through one another. This mutual constitution is dyadic so that if either the code or space 'fail', the production of space 'fails'. Our formulation of code/space is non-deterministic and nonuniversal, and how code/space operates and is experienced is embodied through the performances and interactions of the people within the space (between people, and between people and code). In this sense, code/space is constantly in a state of becoming. We illustrate the nature of code/space, and the discursive regimes that support its production, and demonstrate how the code/spaces of an air travel are simultaneously local and global and induce Castells' notions of 'space of flows' and 'timeless time'.