An Encounter with the Aviation Alphabet

Susanna Castleden

Alfa Alfa is for atmosphere, and air.

Bravo Bravo is for brush strokes and oil paint. A series of small paintings of clouds, skies and planes spotted above the artist’s studio in Mandurah. The anthropologist Tim Ingold, who will make several appearances in this alphabetical encounter, draws parallels between writing and flying, linking the movement of a quill or a calligrapher’s brush to the flight of birds, their feathers, and the wispiness of clouds (Ingold 2021, 69).

Charlie Charlie is for contrails. Rarely seen in the skies over Mandurah, these vapour trails signify the vertical height and horizontal distance of international air travel. These straight lines temporarily mark the sky, making air routes momentarily visible.

Delta Delta is for variant. The skies are empty of planes.

Echo Here I’m going to link echo to shadow. Ingold (2021) reflects on a shadow cast on the ground by a wire in a fence line running parallel to a meandering path. The path, made on and of the earth through the movement of feet, he observes, is not ‘laid over the ground surface, but rather emerges as a differential within it’. Whereas he notes the shadow cares nothing for the ground below, and is ‘indifferent to its variations […] it somehow blends with the surface without apparently touching it at all’ (Ingold 2021, 176).

Foxtrot Foxtrot is one of two dances in this alphabet.

Golf Golf is for graphite. Here I consider the powdery, silvery, expansive and elusive matter as a medium with which I created the dark cloudy backgrounds for a recent series of artworks called Dead Tenements. Images of regional sites such as Gwalia, Pender Bay and Leonora sit on the graphite surface, dark on dark, over which I printed the correlating dead mining tenements. I like that graphite is a mineral.

Hotel Hotel is for the Historical Aerial Photography collection, an archive of thousands of aerial photographs held by Geoscience Australia. The photographs, taken systematically by planes as they traversed the sky in a linear fashion, recorded land information and were used for mapping and surveying prior to the development of satellite imagery. Each photograph was recorded, along with the aircraft’s path, on a flight line diagram, which in itself became a map of a map.

India India is for the Icelandic volcano that, although relatively small in volcanic terms, caused disruptions to flights over Europe as the ash cloud spread and the airspace was declared a ‘No Fly Zone’. The dramatic impact caused by the unanticipated pause to international air travel saw the embodiment of the ash cloud as an entity beyond our human control, it ‘seemed to mock human dreams of omnipotence’ and ‘bristled with affective charge’ (Adey and Anderson 2011, 16).

Juliett Juliett was the pilot flying the plane on the 2nd of December. As it flew overhead, Walker, beckoned by its sound, moved outside to scan the sky, observing the colour of the clouds, the temperature of the day. But the plane, perhaps hidden by the clouds, remained unseen. And Juliett, who had been shark spotting all afternoon, hadn’t found what she’d been searching for either.

Kilo Kondidin, Kirup, Kellerberrin, Katanning, Karratha, Kambalda, Kalbarri

Lima Lima is for lines. In Walker’s paintings these lines inhabit an in-between world, they are incarnations of that which is not visible. They sit in the ‘ghostly’ space of survey lines, of longitude and latitude, of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and the equator (Ingold 2007, 49).

Mike Mandurah, Meekathara, Mingenew, Mullewa, Morowa

November November is for navigation lines. Ingold, reflecting on the fence wire (featured in Echo), imagines a ship’s navigator plotting course on a chart. He states, ‘The lines on his chart, it seems to me, could have had no more business with the actual surface of the sea than the wire of the fence has with the surface of the ground’ (Ingold 2021, 172). It makes me think differently about aviation charts and dead tenement maps.

Oscar Ocean Beach, Onslow, Osmington

Papa Papa is for pencil, which follows on from Golf (graphite) and Lima (lines). In Walker’s paintings a pencil line sits between the viewer and the clouds, delineating invisible spaces and movements in the air. They could be contrails (although unlikely over Mandurah) or waypoints (we get to these at Whiskey), or perhaps markings from an instrument screen.

Quebec Quebec is for Qantas, specifically the A380 named after the Australian pioneering aviator Nancy Bird Walton. In 2015 artist Shaun Gladwell took QF1, the Sydney - London flight, on the Nancy Bird Walton, during which he covertly made a video work with the dancer Kathryn Puie. He commissioned Puie to perform a dance (in a costume hastily donned prior to landing) in the fleetingly empty cabin space created between the last passenger alighting and the service crew boarding.

Romeo Romeo is for rubbing. In a boneyard in Arizona I made a rubbing of the wing of a passenger jet that had been retired from service, surplus to requirements. The two-plus-two seating arrangement inside the empty plane gave some respite from the baking Mojave Desert heat, oxygen masks flaccidly hanging from the ceiling, tray tables not returned to their upright position. When standing on the wing making the rubbing, the heat made the paper brittle, the gesso tacky and my knees blister. Later the desert winds bruised and punctured the paper further. I like to think of this atmospheric involvement akin to Ingold’s argument for the presence of lines in the landscape; that the bruised paper and scumbled gesso have ‘not yet broken off from, or parted company with, the elements out of which they are formed’ (Ingold 2021, 169).

Sierra Sierra is stillness. As the plane moves across the sky, it accentuates our sense of staying put, attending to the task of intimately painting the mobile entity above. Painting is stillness.

Tango the second dance, is for tail. I made a rubbing of an airplane tail in Utah in late 2019, a few months before mobility was halted by a global pandemic, when aircraft were still flying. The plane, a 1950’s Expeditor, had already been grounded after being retired from service 35 years earlier. I was drawn to its stout frame and silvery studded surface and the idea that this type of aircraft was used for aerial mapping missions. I liked that it had helped map the world, and in turn, I was mapping, at 1:1 scale, its worn and marked surface through the tactile process of frottage.

Uniform Ultramarine blue and umber.

Victor Victor is for the thousands of vertical photographs held in the Historical Aerial Photography archive, stitched together to make a map of the country.

Whisky Whisky is for waypoints. Waypoints are invisible geographical markers in the sky, designated by coordinates and a five-letter capitalised word; they punctuate air routes, and for pilots they are ‘the sky’s audible currency of place’ (Vanhoenacke 2016). The names, like the aviation alphabet, are designed to be distinct and easily pronounceable by voice, and although mostly randomly generated, sometimes these names have expressive links to the geographies and histories below. With charmingly esoteric humour, pilots approaching Perth airport from the northwest have to manoeuvre through the following waypoints: WONSA, then JOLLY, then SWAGY, then CAMBS, BUIYA, BILLA, BONGS, UNDER, ACOOL, EBARR and finally TREES.

X-ray is for sunray.

Yankee Yanchep, Yallingup, York, Yalgoo, Yarloop

Zebra And finally, Zebra is for the Zenith CH2000 Alarus, a two-seater aircraft based at Jandakot airport. I like to think it was the Zenith that drew Walker’s eye skywards above his studio in Mandurah, left some lines, hid behind clouds, created some stories, and is the central character in at least one of these paintings.

Ingold, T. (2021) Correspondences. Cambridge. Polity Press. John Wiley & Sons.

Ingold, T. (2007) Lines: A brief history. New York. Routledge.

Peter Adey & Ben Anderson (2011) Anticipation, Materiality, Event: The Icelandic Ash Cloud Disruption and the Security of Mobility, Mobilities, 6:1, 11-20, DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2011.532919

Vanhoenacker, M. Skyfaring. A Journey with a pilot https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2015-06-02/a-pilotexplains-waypoints-the-hidden-geography-of-the-sky accessed 20/06/21

Author’s note

Airplanes have featured in a few of my works over the years, most recently a large-scale rubbing of the tail of an Expeditor. The rubbing was a way of mapping, at 1:1 scale, the studded surface of the tail. I was drawn to Walker’s paintings for the airplanes, their atmosphere, and the tiny graphite cartographic details that emerged through clouds. The works on the gallery wall precipitated a journey of sorts as the viewer moved along the line of 30 small, detailed works. For me, the aviation alphabet was a delightful way to bring all these parts together.

Susanna Castleden is an artist and Dean of Research in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. Through large-scale drawing and printmaking processes, Susanna’s art practice considers mobility, mapping, distance and proximity, and often includes physical or durational elements. Susanna has received a number of awards including the Linden Prize (VIC); the Burnie Print Prize (TAS), Joondalup Prize (WA) and Bankwest Art Prize (WA) as well as runner up in the Fremantle Print Award (WA). Susanna’s artworks are included in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of WA.