Drawing lines in the sky: The emotional labours of airspace production

Introduction

Recent years have seen growing theoretical interest in the concept of airspace. This has not simply been a return to a managerial-style study of air traffic flows and their engineering (Kopardekar et al., 2009; Metzger and Parasuraman, 2001; Williams et al., 2003), but entails a much broader attention to the sociocultural character of the production and experience of the air. As Peter Adey et al. (2007: 774) argued “[c]utting across the different landscapes of aeromobility—the airport, the plane, the flight route … airspace is not some asocial realm or ‘non-place’, but a space whose embodied, emotional and practised geographies remain to be adequately charted.” Accordingly, scholars have attempted to fill the skies with more of such understandings, rediscovering the supposedly ‘lifeless’ medium of air travel as something more animated and culturally inflected [see also Gottdiener (2001) and Harper and Randall (1992) for some earlier perspectives]. From interrogating the affective registers of being airborne (Bissell, 2013; Budd, 2011) to taking apart the way airspace is tightly assembled, and, hence, made susceptible to disruptions (Adey, 2013; Adey et al., 2011; Budd and Adey, 2009), this scholarship has fostered a more circumspect view of the air, and how its peculiar configurations both support and jeopardise aeromobilities.

This paper similarly takes as its starting point the idea that airspace is not some neutral interface for flying to take place in. As a system of organisation, it is necessarily a domain created out of particular human intents and interventions (Lin, 2014a). Despite the widespread recognition of this fact among mobilities scholars, there seems to be a comparatively thin emphasis on how policies that enfold airspace are sustained through the daily efforts invested by people, or more precisely aviation workers. While it is true that current literatures on the technical, legal, and regulatory assemblages of flying take care to propound a socially inflected view—often drawing from perspectives in the ‘West’ at that—they tend to suggest a definitive idea of aeromobility as a singular phenomenon, neglecting as a result the possibility of its processural (re)making in context (see, however, Kitchin and Dodge, 2009). Given this, it is useful to revalorise how ‘people’, as creative agents, can flexibly affect and reshape the skies above them, whose ongoing labours contribute to multiple practised geographies of the air. Airspaces, in short, do not exist as a stable organisational fact to be replicated worldwide, but are continually adapted by the personnel who work on them.

To flesh out these ideas, I turn to the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore for an alternative perspective. My choice of a ‘non-Western’ empirical case is not only intended to detract from the preponderant views that have so far emanated out of Anglo-American-based studies, but also foregrounds how peopled interventions in airspace may matter even more in parts of the world where the ‘global’ rules of aviation are not set, and where the gravity of aviation governance is not found (Lin, 2014b). Indeed, for Singapore, because of its small market, and the presence of stiff regional competition for through-traffic, airspace is not encountered as a matrix of standard procedures to be formulaically transplanted from the ‘centre’, but as a shifting set of vectors that needs to be firmly pinned down through adaptive measures in business development. Insofar as this second intent adds something more to the Anglo-American examples existing literatures are accustomed to, the production of (this) airspace must also be re-excavated, through relating the ‘global’ architectures of aviation to the unique circumstances of the city-state.

The rest of this paper is divided into five sections. In section 2 the plausibility that airspace can be manipulated and enhanced by the daily contributions of aviation workers in Singapore will be contemplated. In particular, Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) concept of “emotional labour” will be highlighted as one strategy that aspirant hubs like Singapore have deployed to draw business (ie, passengers and airlines) to themselves. After a brief note on the context of Singapore and my research methodology in section 3, sections 4 and 5 go on to explore two sets of peopled performances by the employees of Singapore Airlines, and of the nation’s Air Hub Development Units ¹ to ‘rethread’ the vectors of airspace through the city. Special attention will be paid to their attempts to infuse particular favourable social atmospheres in the air and on the ground that are friendly to air traffic growth, and that can efficaciously respond to the constraints that Singapore faces as an (intermediate) hub located away from large, wealthy consumer markets. Implications on the divergent ways in which mobility futures are forged in this part of the world will follow in the concluding section.

Labouring to (re)produce airspace

In the span of a few short years, mobilities research has given the academy some innovative vocabularies for (re)articulating airspace as a culturally rich facet of aviation. Dispelling the notion that it is a formless space inhabited by inert flying machines, Lucy Budd (2009) was perhaps one of the first to make this aerial patchwork visible again as a legal–technical framework governed by air rights, airways, control zones, and aeronautical procedures. Specifically, Budd (2009: 132) contends that airspace is better construed as “a product of numerous interlocking geopolitical, economic, environmental, social, technical and commercial practices that … manifest themselves in different ways.” Subscribing to this view too, various authors have thus sought to inflect airspace with such multiplicitous forms of practice and manipulation, including such considerations as the systematic organisation of airspace into aerial territories (Brobst, 2004; Kaplan, 2006), and the annexation of airspaces by powerful states (Williams, 2007, 2010). Yet others take interest in the reconfigurable nature of airspace by design, understanding the resource in terms of its tactical deployments for varying civilian and military purposes at different times (Budd, 2009; Williams, 2011).

This is not to suggest that airspaces always work in the way that they are supposed to. In a 2011 special issue of Mobilities (Birtchnell and Büscher, 2011), several scholars came together to give new meaning to European civil airspace, not by deciphering its assemblage, but by thinking through its dysfunction. Using the 2010 episode of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption as a foil, their reflections uncovered the lines of weakness latent within the ‘risky’ architecture of flying, prompting an urgent relook at the contemporary reliance on aviation. In particular, their interrogations revealed a system that was not only fragmented—as characterised by “[a] lack of harmonised and enforceable rules … among the European Union’s 27 member states” (O’Regan, 2011: 23)—but also problematic for its predication on (faulty) anticipatory knowledges that generated mobilities “always made with the potential to be disrupted” (Adey and Anderson, 2011: 18). A single alteration to ‘normal’ operating procedures in that episode rendered European authorities helpless in determining what level of ash was safe for flying, and how airspace could be continued as a coherent, workable system. Bar the usual constellation of conditions that must stably hang together, airspace, along with the mobilities it entrained, was thus found to break down catastrophically, in betrayal of its operational limits (Budd et al., 2011).

Notwithstanding these admonitions, I suggest that airspaces do not always have to behave in such definitive ways—as either a working infrastructure adhering to certain predetermined functions, or a paradigm of dramatic failure. Oftentimes, they are managed as a kind of improvised/improvisable entity, interspersed by bursts of human creativity, (re)negotiation, and even contestation [see Budd (2009) on community protests related to terminal flight paths]. As I have lamented elsewhere (Lin, 2014a: 221), “scholarly efforts in unpacking the tightly knitted ways in which global air travel is ‘assembled’ … [tend to emphasise] too much on the ‘hardware’ of aviation systems, at the expense of the more flexible joints and sinews of human spontaneity.” To this extent, the practical role that people—as the intentional drivers and users of mobilities—play in the sustenance of airspace remains little understood. A (re)emphasis on the everyday toils of rational actors is in this sense timely, finding particular resonance with situations where the vectors of airspace have to be maintained and fought over through efforts like providing ‘better service’ or engaging in trade missions, negotiations, and self-promotion. Central to these arguments is the idea that human agency permeates through the daily organisation of aerial networks, such that aeromobilities take on particular trajectories and routings, and constitute a space of hidden entrepreneurial actions.

In this context, emotional labour presents itself as a valuable form of human input that can be used to facilitate the development of these coveted aviation links and businesses. A term coined by Arlie Hochschild, “emotional labour” denotes work practices in a breed of service-oriented occupations emergent around the 1980s, in which employees seek “to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild, 1983: 7). Unlike physical or mental labour, what matters in this ‘work’ is not a tangible product, but the establishment of a feeling or relationship with customers or clients, so that particular outcomes—eg, cooperation, repeat patronage—can be materialised. Paradigmatically, the job of the flight attendant has been singled out as one of the most explicit cases, seeing that crew members are tasked to partake in a self-denying process of “deep acting”, to instil a “sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place” (Hochschild, 1983: 7) within passengers (see also Whitelegg, 2002). By construing the dispensation of such moods, smiles, and gestures as a “ware for sale” (Adey and Lin, 2014: 67), Hochschild “successfully links the ideas of work and emotion”, demonstrating how social actors are made to put on performances that are “used as a vital part of the capitalist labour process” (Bolton and Boyd, 2003: 290).

Critical reflections on this aspect of flight attending have in fact been well developed in the academy, though not always geared towards evincing how emotional labours may be used to alter aerial networks. Still, these literatures provide important clues as to how the air, and its ‘acceptable’ experiences, is never far estranged from the daily labour performances of real people. Drew Whitelegg’s (2007) work, for one, usefully historicises the stewardess’s role in allaying passengers’ airborne fears at the dawn of commercial aviation. To foster an air of assurance, Boeing Air Transport (later United Airlines) had in the 1930s accepted a graduate nurse, Ellen Church’s, offer to serve as a carer for passengers’ welfare. By the 1950s this task of being the “public face” of airlines gradually took shape as “white women’s work” among the world’s first (Western) carriers, as air companies deemed it fit “to offer passengers a genteel ‘hostess,’ rather than a racially subordinate servant” [Barry (2007: 12); but see Yano (2011) on the Nisei stewardess as a symbol of cosmopolitanism]. Male stewards, once the only servers onboard, were, on the other hand, rendered obsolete in some quarters, with carriers like Pan American going so far as to adopt a female-only hiring policy in 1958 (Tiemeyer, 2013); yet others employed “wearers of ‘micro-mini skirts and hot pants” (Hayes and Tiffney 2007: 117) in a risqué capitalisation on feminine appeal. In these ways, a peculiar workforce employed to tend to (male, heterosexual) passengers’ needs was being normalised, instituting the craft of feminised care as part of airlines’ business practices.

Flight attendants are, however, not the only ones who invoke emotional labour in the world of aviation, and beyond. To return to The Managed Heart, Hochschild (1983) makes mention of another vocation that likewise requires employees to perform “deep acting”. Calling the bill collector’s work an inverse form of the flight attendant’s, she highlights how these workers similarly need to observe “feeling rules”, to induce a feeling of fear or being trapped in the debtor. Specifically, “[w]hereas a flight attendant is encouraged to elevate the passenger’s status by lowering her [sic] own, a bill collector is given permission to puff himself [sic] up, to take the upper hand and exercise a certain license in dealing with others” (pages 143–144). Emotional labour, as such, has multiple iterations, and does not always connote service of the caring kind. As other authors add, professions from nurses to call centre operators (Mann and Cowburn, 2005; Mulholland, 2002), and, as will be demonstrated later, commercial and government negotiators, all practise variable forms of emotional labour, and endeavour to produce particular emotional states in their clients. Not only do different facets of human feeling thus become commoditised with each of these vocations, emotions have also grown to be vital resources to attain business aims.

Although ethically salient, my aim is not to rehash Hochschild’s arguments regarding the exploitative dangers of commoditising human feeling. To revisit my previous point about the peopled nature of airspace, my reflections are more concerned with how the air, as a productive ‘territory’ crucial to access and economic development in hub cities like Singapore, can likewise find utility for such labours, as a ‘soft’, competitive means to help (re)structure global airways. Put in another way, the sociocultural constitution of the skies, and the lines that crisscross them, is much more complex than it appears, for it is not predictably composed of machines, rules, and protocol (cf Budd, 2009), but also of ongoing human interactions and negotiations, whose own (assembled) outcomes add up to the final realities and networks of the air. There is as such a certain ‘layering’ of effects in the assemblage of airspace, as interactions between things and people, in variable permutations, cause specific aerial morphologies to emerge. In the following, I will extend these ideas by reflecting on how airspace in Singapore is spun by such emotional handiwork. Although the usual constituents of machines, the atmosphere, and regulations still stand, the city-state’s mobilities would not have been at their current scale or shape without the inputs of its greatest resource—people.

Aviation notes on Singapore

As a trading society long cognisant of its reliance on connectivity, Singapore has persistently placed international transport and mobility at the heart of its strategies for survival. This impetus became even more pronounced following the end of British colonialism, when the cessation of formal ties with the metropole, and the city’s eventual ejection from Malaya, meant that Singapore would subsist as a small island-state shorn of hinterlands and resources (Chua, 1995). Accordingly, one central tenet of the city-state’s postindependence goals had been to (re)thrust itself onto world markets, through fashioning itself as a highly accessible urban economy, not unlike its historical role as a British entrepôt port. Oswin and Yeoh (2010) obliquely make reference to this consciousness when they use the term ‘mobile city’ to describe developmental Singapore, underlining its government’s eagerness to transform the island into a ‘global city’ serviced by trade, and robust streams of people, goods, and capital. This time, however, the city would achieve these aims without the help of a more powerful sovereign. Whereas the British used to be responsible for establishing air links between Europe and the city, and would finance the construction of infrastructures such as airports (Department of Civil Aviation, 1981), Singapore would now have to autonomously devise ways to attract aerial (and maritime) traffic to itself, even as its closest neighbours were doing likewise (Raguraman, 1997).

Spurred by this motivation, the Singapore government has been unsparing in its investments in the city’s aerial infrastructures. One notable example was the construction of Changi Airport, a brand new twin-runway (and soon, three-runway) aerodrome complete with a “multi-million dollar” air navigation system that was state of the art for its time (The Straits Times, 1981). Contrary to recommendations by international consultants to simply add a second airstrip to the existing (partly-British-funded) Paya Lebar Airport, the government chose to splurge on this new coastal airport at a cost of S $1.5 billion (US $700 million in 1981), adorning it with fountains, waterfalls, and lush tropical plants (Department of Civil Aviation, 1981). When it was opened in 1981, Singapore’s air passenger handling capacity would double from Paya Lebar’s 10 million per annum to over 20 million (Singapore Government, 1986a). These (ground-based) improvements were ostensibly geared towards helping Singapore gain an advantage over the likes of Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur, which all had a similar desire to become the prime hub of Southeast Asia. By offering passengers a comfortable atmosphere to dwell in (Cheong, 2006), Changi was—and still is—the anchor, and extension of airspace, that made high-capacity aeromobile flows through the city attractive and possible.

Expanding the capacity of ground facilities is not the city-state’s only preoccupation. Singapore also advocates a free and open sky as the British did in the heyday of colonialism. In pursuing this “liberal aviation policy” (Singapore Government, 1986b), the government actively courted foreign airlines to serve the city. This included plans, in as early as the late 1960s, to receive “Jumbo jets and supersonic aircraft” (Singapore Government, 1968)—both of which would transpire within twelve years of independence: the former in 1971, when Pan American Airways flew the first Boeing 747 to Singapore (The Straits Times, 1971); and the latter in 1977, when a British Airways joint venture launched a Concorde service (The Straits Times, 1977) linking Singapore with London. A national carrier, Singapore Airlines (SIA), was furthermore created in 1972 to bolster these efforts. As Singapore’s main network carrier, the Finance-Ministry-owned airline soon proved popular among passengers, and was regularly voted top in international air travel surveys (The Straits Times, 1980). In 1980 the eight-year-old airline was already contributing as much as 3.7% (S $773 million) to Singapore’s GDP, employing one in eighty-one local workers, and carrying some one million visitors to the island (The Business Times, 1981). These remarkable results, and the speed with which they occurred, reiterated Singapore’s resolve to be part of the ‘new’ (air) world economy. They were testament to how a resource-less city-state could become a giant in aviation by virtue of its strategic moves.

The rest of this paper now examines these strategic moves by referring to two veins of empirical research that were conducted as part of a wider doctoral study. The first involves an archival examination of over 100 issues of two SIA staff newsletters (HighPoint, the cabin crew newsletter, and Outlook, the company newspaper) sourced at the Singapore National Library. Accompanied by relevant news reports, these newsletters were studied from beginning to end, with recurrent themes coded and organised by topic. Although the collection spanned three decades through to 2009, only articles published prior to 1990 will be referred to, as these coincide most with the airline’s early bids to gain market penetration (and not later pursuits like expansion and acquisition).

The second comprises fifteen interviews conducted in September–October 2012 at Changi Airport with seventeen (or nearly half) of Singapore’s thirty-five managerial or Air Hub Development Unit (AHDU) officers. Meant to probe the scope of these units’ air-hub-building work, these sessions were mostly held one-on-one with the respondents, save two which were conducted with a pair of officers each (by request). Excepting four senior officers who had been employed for over five years, most respondents only had one to four years of experience in the (high-turnover) ADHUs. But prior work in other aviation departments and/or similar market development roles rendered these subjects well versed in their vocations. Taking place before the archival research, these interviews not only shed light on the different kind of emotional labours supporting Singapore’s air-hub-building efforts; they, being conversations with actual industry practitioners, also informed my understandings of the total efforts—including the founding of SIA—taken by the Singapore government to sustain the city’s mobilities. Notwithstanding that these empirical materials are located at different ends of Singapore’s (short) independent history, their juxtaposition affords an appreciation of how human resources have all along been at the heart of the city-state’s aviation tactics. Common to the labours of other air hubs like Bangkok, Dubai, and Hong Kong, these measures are indicative of the proactive steps small aviation markets in Asia often have to adopt in order to stay viable in an (air) world (still) dominated by Western Europe and North America.

Off to a flying start

Founded in October 1972 as a national vehicle to conduct international air traffic through Singapore, SIA played an important role in ensuring that the mobilities sustaining the city-state would at no time dry up. Since its inception, the airline’s chief architects, along with the Ministry of Finance to whom SIA was accountable, strove to build an air company that was second to none, even on a par with Western veteran carriers that had dominated long-haul traffic since the colonial days. A key part of their strategy was to discipline a people—a cabin crew—whose service and emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) would make passengers’ transit an immensely enjoyable experience, as long as they did so via Singapore. Within this agenda, the figure of the ‘Singapore Girl’ was carefully conceived to market SIA, even as new stations in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the USA were added to the airline’s fledgling network (Singapore Airlines, 1979). Certainly, other airlines also paid meticulous attention to their crew’s image (Yano, 2011), but, in an industry whose standards had been solidified, SIA needed an even more striking icon that was recognisable as Singapore’s counteroffer of ‘good service’. Beyond providing reliable care, she was to “personif[y] oriental charm and friendliness … [and offer an] in-flight service … better than anything anyone had experienced for a long time” (Allen, 1990: 72).

The creation of such a “fantasmatic Asian femininity” (Heng, 1997: 39) was a matter of serious deliberation for a young SIA wanting to draw in (then-mostly Western) travellers. Envisioned by image designer, Ian Batey (2002: 121), to possess “an inbuilt natural grace, charm and femininity that comes from being Asian”, the Singapore Girl was expected to appear at her best the moment she was seen. Retired Deputy Chairman of SIA, Lim (2000), had this to say about her uniform:

[W]e said we must get the best for Singapore. What is good for Singapore is not good enough … . So, I decided that we should get world-class people to come … . I got [French designer] Pierre Balmain to do the uniform.”

As a more concrete (and distinctive) part of their emotional labour, Singapore Girls also had to put on a front that would help (re)produce a sense of calming comfort and ‘familiarity’ in the air for the (Western) passengers that SIA was trying to court. One of the first corrections that they, along with the flight crew, had had to undergo was to lose their ‘unpleasant-sounding’ Singaporean accent deemed incongruent with SIA’s image. Beginning 1984, British Council instructors, equipped with custom-made English language coaching materials, were employed to offer them “speech therapy” and to help “improve the quality of in-flight announcements [among] crew members who [got] a B grade for their announcing ability” (HighPoint, 1984). Students had to attend two four-and-one-half hour tuition sessions, before shifting onto individual practice with a private tutor, who would give personal advice on how to ‘improve’. Through these lessons, crew members were expected to apply what they had learned to situations onboard the aircraft, “us[ing] your voice to give a favourable impression of yourself and the airline you represent”, and “us[ing] ‘referring tones’, which sound more friendly than the ‘proclaiming’ tone” (HighPoint, 1984). Presumably, by offering a rare mix of Asian charm and staff who spoke ‘intelligible’ English, the airline was able to instil confidence in a transport form normally known for Western supremacy. As a means to differentiate itself, SIA now demanded of its crew more than just the presentation of ‘attractive’ bodies, but also a conscientious effort to change their speech patterns.

Besides getting crew to watch their speech, the airline also believed in inculcating the ‘right’ values of social etiquette among crew members. Jennie Nicholas, an Australian consultant who came to Singapore in 1972, was placed in charge of this task. At her training school, flight attendants learned the ways of “quiet politeness”; as a journalist who visited the campus reported, the school’s entrance was adorned with a banner that read “We depend on the customer, not they on us”, while “classes began with the girls repeating: ‘A passenger is human, with biases, feelings and emotions like our own’” (The Sunday Mail, 1986). Suggestive of whom SIA’s target clientele was, every stewardess had to acquire the skills of Western fine dining, as chopsticks were banned in the school. An entry in a HighPoint issue (1986a) corroborated this, by featuring a story of Nicholas’s etiquette course on “the continental style of table manners and the proper use of cutlery”; taboos such as “coughing over others; sneezing without placing the hand over the mouth; combing hair in public” were, moreover, raised as gestures to avoid. This was another example of SIA’s distinctive training programme that sought to alter the cultural behaviour of, and (consequently) demand a heightened level of emotional labour from, the Singapore Girl. It was as if, for all the desirability of an Oriental crew, it now came with defects and inferiorities that needed to be remedied through rigorous reformation, in order for the airline to set itself apart from regional and global competitors.

Closely related was another movement designed to instil ‘courtesy’ as a way of life in the air. Heavily emphasised in the 1980s, this effort had roots in a wider national social engineering campaign in Singapore then to inspire citizens to be more considerate, and to create a ‘pleasant’ social environment for residents, tourists, and (Western) investors (Tham, 1983). As the global face of the city-state, the Singapore Girl logically became a starting point for the airline to enjoin itself to this effort. To do so, SIA’s courtesy campaign would bring Singapore Girls’ aerial performances to terrestrial grounds for rehearsal. Since 1982, “cabin crew courtesy divisional cells” and a “courtesy committee” were set up for staff to mingle in, have meals together, and practise “acts of kindness” with each other (HighPoint, 1986b). By starting the process from inside the organisation out, the airline meant not only to improve working relations among crew members, but also to nurture that “someone who shows concern and respect for his [sic] superiors, peers, subordinates and the public through his/her manners, behaviour, polite speech and patient listening” (HighPoint, 1986c). By staging aeromobility as a(nother) ‘pleasant’ experience, SIA was once more applying emotional labour with a different twist—invoking a fusion between Hochschild’s (1983) ‘deep acting’, and a cultural work to have crew behave ‘Western’.

With other Asian airlines ‘catching up’ to match SIA’s distinctive offerings by the 1980s (Outlook, 1986a), the company was seen to further refine the delivery of this ‘good service’. Having corrected the Singapore Girl’s image and mannerisms, SIA now encouraged its crew to outdo themselves and become more animated and personable in-flight carers. As announced in an Outlook issue (1986b), “[t]o improve passenger relations and service, Cabin Crew [Division] has adopted the theme ‘PR in the Cabin’ for 1986 [where] Crew are encouraged to interact more with passengers and to constantly attend to their needs.” One group of passengers that would be the recipients of such heightened attention was mothers with infants. As a newsletter entry entitled “Caring for babies—the Singapore Girl way” (Outlook, 1986c) reads,

Mothers travelling with their babies can count on our cabin crew for help in seeing to the needs of tiny tots. Our cabin crew, especially the flight stewardesses, are trained to pay special attention to mothers with young children.”

Adding to their usual slate of emotional labour, Singapore Girls now had to: help the mother with her luggage; hold the baby while the mother put on her seat belt or visited the washroom; inform her of the types of baby food available; and frequently check with her on whether additional help was needed, in a bid to further entrench the airline’s popularity among long-haul passengers. Extending this special care to other groups, the Singapore Girl was additionally to be counted upon to play the role of “Big Sister” with “the little ones”, “cuddl[ing] the babies and play[ing] with the older children whenever time permits” (Outlook, 1986d); and to lend a listening ear as “a counsellor and a friend” (Outlook, 1990) to grieving passengers (such as those travelling to a funeral). Practically for Singapore Girls, this meant that their airborne tasks had to be sped up, to keep pace with the acceleration of competition in regional skies. By delivering an emotional work that was always one cut above others’, the lines of flight that SIA spun to connect its home city to the world could then be perpetuated.

This section has sought to relate Singapore Girls and their emotional labours to SIA’s (and hence Singapore’s) ability to attract potential fliers to itself. While the flag carrier’s ostensible focus on selling female and (appropriately) self-Orientalising carework was to some extent demeaning, these sorts of corporeal and emotional commercialisation have to be understood in the wider geoeconomic context of Singapore’s postindependence development, particularly after the port city’s estrangement from its former colonial circuits. Admittedly, the archival materials used have only been able to showcase the scripts written by SIA for Singapore Girls rather than their actual performances. But for an airline that had received top honours for its service just two years after its inception (Outlook, 1980), and whose training programmes were reputed for their efficacy as a form of corporate disciplining (Chong, 2007), these newsletters are arguably more than just symbolic, connoting some degree of actualisation too. To the extent that passenger traffic via Singapore had thus been consolidated through these peopled inputs, the quiet powers of the Singapore Girl’s banal toils must also be recognised as a crucial part in the re-production of Singapore’s airspace. Without resorting to any complex technicalities, this ‘low-tech’ manoeuvre was what in part made SIA a top airline of choice for transiting passengers, and Singapore a preferred connecting point in Southeast Asia.

Launching a thousand flights

Fast-forwarding to today, while the city-state has grown to become a respectable “global transfer point” (Kesselring, 2009) on the wings of SIA, its appetite for new vectors has not diminished. To further intensify flows, Singapore no longer depends primarily on its maturing national carrier, but also enlists the resources of other airlines, of other states, to help grow the sector. A two-pronged approach has been adopted: the first seeks to encourage a more diverse portfolio of foreign airlines to join Singapore, thereby maximising the city’s exposure to additional air-lines; the second entails maintaining a liberal air policy ² with both existing state partners and new ‘emerging’ nations, so as to (legally) allow more aerial activities to take flight. Straightforward as this may sound, the implementation of these two agendas entails further emotional labours. This time, though, instead of soothing passengers with the comforts of the Singapore Girl, new webs of social relations are spun by Singapore’s ADHU officers with their commercial and political counterparts, to get them to do business with the city-state.

The principle of leveraging foreign carriers to deepen the striations running between Singapore and the world is not in fact new (Aviation Views, 1984). In 1986 the CAAS set up a “civil aviation promotion team to actively encourage and persuade foreign airlines to operate services to Singapore” (Aviation Views, 1986). Three decades on, this function remains intact and continues to build on the supposition that Singapore has to work harder than others to attract new links to its small domestic market. This contrasts with large urban hubs such as “London Heathrow”, which one AHDU officer cites as having “a lot [more] inherent appeal” than airports in ‘peripheral’ Southeast Asia. As another (senior) officer explains:

Because long-haul [airlines] will be looking at Asia, not just Singapore, but Asia as a whole, you also want to ensure that they consider Singapore [and not its competitor] as … a gateway to the rest of the region … . So hence you do need to proactively promote these growth potentials to the long-haul players” (senior officer A, interview, 9 October 2012).

A key part of this strategy entails having AHDU officers engage (foreign) airline network planners actively on the ground, and to build in their minds a favourable business profile of their city against competing regional ones. Working against the inertia of its small market size, their aim is to coax these decision makers to constantly consider increasing seat supply, or the number (frequency) of airline services to Singapore:

For existing carriers …, [we] meet [their network planners] regularly to have … dialogue sessions with them, and try to understand their business model. What are their upcoming plans, and how Singapore could better fit into their upcoming network plans? So we are always trying to encourage them to increase frequency or even up-gauge the aircraft … [For] players that are still missing in our portfolio, we will … fly to their HQs, try to arrange meetings … to tell them about [our] airport … and what kind of value propositions that Singapore brings to them.” (officer B, interview, 4 October 2012).

To induce this particular outcome portends no small degree of interpersonal skill, requiring AHDU officers to put on their most amicable front while being aggressive marketers. As officer D shares an instance of how this balance can be achieved:

On the local level, we [try to] engage … the airlines with offices that are already [in Singapore]. So we try to find occasions to visit them (laughs). Like recently … I just did a round [of visitation]. Mooncake festival is coming up right? So, you know, there’s [sic] gifts, we go visit the airlines, we talk at such occasions” (interview, 21 September 2012).

Besides wooing foreign carriers to converge on Singapore, the city-state must additionally sign what are known as air services agreements (ASAs) with each airline’s country of registration, in order for air routes to be legally flown at stipulated (seat) capacities (ICAO, 1999). This is not simply a matter of administration, but a mandatory process of ‘bartering’ before revenue flights can commence—a task made more difficult by Singapore’s small size and lack of cities/destinations to trade with (Raguraman, 1986). While former Deputy Chairman of SIA, Lim (2000) called it a “question of horse-trading”, an AHDU officer states,

Just’ cos you want to sign an ASA doesn’t mean that the other country … want[s] to sign an ASA. So there’s also other work … like … to network, to cultivate, to build good relations with [government officials of] other countries” (officer E, interview, 19 September 2012).

In a labour not unlike that of the previous group of AHDU officers, the idea is for Singapore to forge a complementary set of “good relations”, but now with political counterparts. As another respondent, officer F (interview, 20 September 2012), puts it, based on two years of negotiating experience, “[i]deally, the rapport should be good on all levels … [so that] they [would be] more willing to engage you.” Only when such dialogues are forthcoming, eventually leading to an ASA, can prospective aerial vectors among foreign airlines be activated.

This intergovernmental form of “rapport” similarly needs to be patiently cultivated. As diplomatic ties are not built on profit motives (as they are for airlines), but a tenuous sense of political trust (Levi and Stoker, 2000), these relational strategies can require even ‘warmer’, or friendlier, kinds of emotional labour:

When I first [started], it was more of [formal] cultivating. Then slowly [our] conversations can be … brought to discussions on aviation issues … [and] the common, general kind of conversation, just to get to know each other better … . You can just talk about anything, about their family, food, places they have been to … [U]sually you need to establish that familiarity. You have to be comfortable talking to them, they have to be comfortable talking to you. Then it’s easier for discussions to get going” (officer G, interview, 27 September 2012).

The above instances of interpersonal engagements that AHDU officers perform are by no means exclusive to Singapore. But the intensity with which they are enacted, at an early stage of the city-state’s aviation development, not only shows the proactive steps (of interacting, coaxing, and sometimes ingratiating others) an aspirant Asian hub has often had to resort to; it also underscores the centrality of peopled interventions and emotional labour in the construction of Singapore’s airspace. Succinctly put, the accretion of air links to Singapore must be seen as a distinctive outcome that is contrived, strategically attained, and laboriously fought for by a small aviation market. Indeed, for this tiny nation, facing a global aerial hierarchy that relegates it to only secondary, always-potentially-bypassable status, the ability of each officer to pull the right (heart)strings with his or her counterpart is far from a mundane undertaking. Paralleling how Singapore Girls once acquainted passengers with a new, better way of navigating the skies (through Singapore), these officers now try to offer passengers even more of the same option, by striating airspace afresh with as many lines as they can possibly forge.

Conclusion

Claiming that airspace is produced through its peopling is not to carelessly overstate the exceptionalism of human interventions in a field known for its high technical reliance. Neither is it meant to be a critique suggesting, quite mistakenly, that aviation researchers have completely omitted human action in their analyses (see Kitchin and Dodge, 2009). Rather, by fleshing out the additional emotional labours—performed through comforting bodies, courteous gestures, and cordial relationships—that Singapore(ans) has(have) invested in its airline/aviation industry, this paper has spotlighted another mode of ‘airspace-making’, after all the ground rules for the air’s technological execution, its legality and its commercial norms have been set. While seemingly complete and ready for use, the same airspace can apparently still be reworked within its own frame, possessing a structure that is contestable. It is exactly at this interstice that Singapore—today, a well-connected city in Asia—was able to participate in the alteration of the fabric of the air to its advantage, through coassembling existing protocol and norms with peopled inputs critical to its air links.

Besides demonstrating the susceptibility of airspace to human-laboured modifications in its networks, this paper has furthermore shown a different facet of emotional labour not usually highlighted in aeromobilities research, or elsewhere. More than a commercial trade in human feeling (Hochschild, 1983), or a set of labour performances contingent to the airline/service industry (Barry, 2007; Whitelegg, 2007), emotional labour may sometimes serve as one of only a few differentiating factors available to small-time players and societies seeking to make a mark in industries historically dominated by others. In Singapore’s case, insofar as it does not possess the clout to unilaterally set rules for airspace (eg, to abolish protectionist ASAs), or to create new cabin formats that would allow it to distinguish its aerial product materially, it would also have to work around the inertia of its nonleading status through the deft use of such labours. This signals the circumscribed spaces that players falling outside the (agenda-setting) ‘centre’ often have to contend with—whether in aviation, or similar service-oriented industries like finance and education. Even for successful overcomers like Singapore, the (re)threading of the world’s circuits in these fields does not come with the latitude of constituting a brand new (ae)reality per se, but involves incremental innovations and people-performed ‘technologies’ in persuasion and business development.

This raises a final, but ethically salient, point about the justifiability of emotional labour as a form of capital extraction. As the example of aviation demonstrates, there is a politics of place in the distribution of the world’s aeromobilities (see Lin, 2014b; Urry, 2007), which tends to concentrate on large, affluent consumer markets—and, in turn, fuels their future growth and attractiveness as destinations. Consequently, while, for ‘global’ nodes like London and New York, it would seem that vectors blithely “emanate” (Adey, 2010) from them by virtue of their historical dominance, others like Singapore, besides making infrastructural investments, have to proactively invest human resources to serenade these aerial (life)lines to touch down, converge, and be anchored to them, so as to stay relevant or fend off emerging competition [see Derudder et al. (2013) on Dubai’s (re)competitive strategies]. In this context, emotional labour can clearly be an invaluable resource, especially for the latter, for securing an aerial future that would otherwise have proved elusive, engendering an ambivalently positive outcome rather than labour practices to be repudiated straightaway. Without turning to the encounters of (im)mobility and constraints ‘elsewhere’—in Asia—this alternative insight on the utilities and merits of such peopled inputs, even if they seem exploitative at first, would also have been easily overlooked.