Doctoral Dissertation Research: Training Pilots, Crafting Moderns: A Comparative History of Aviation and Subjectivity in the U.S. and Japan, 1930-1960

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation funded by the Science, Technology & Society program examines the historical development of airplane pilot training programs, for which a diverse set of simulation instruments, scientific knowledge, engineering practices, and military and civilian institutions were mobilized. It examines how several groups with varying backgrounds and interests attempted to train and even constrain the pilots, thereby forging a modern figure with specific qualifications of bodies, minds, and skills. By comparing the pilot training programs in the U.S. and Japan before, during, and after World War II, it demonstrates that different regimes of pilot training are embedded in particular histories and cultures. The concern of the project is not so much what pilots did, but what they became. Pilots performed reconnaissance, transport, and combat missions in times of war and peace and these activities had immense significance in the conduct of war and in the peacetime economy. But of more interest to the project is what kind of people they became through their selection and training to perform those tasks. An under-appreciated aspect of aviation is that it facilitated, mostly in the urgency of wars, the mass-production of people who learned new capacities such as perceiving the world through electro-mechanical instruments even in the absence of real sensorial contacts with the world. What pilots embodied was a new mode of existence and behavior which they were not born with but which they acquired through research and training. In the process of training pilots, a distinctively modern understanding of humans -- how we see and move or how well our bodies fit with machines -- was forged. As pilots were trained and knowledges of them generated, a modern kind of subjectivity was also crafted.