Air transport regulation is different from that of sea and road transport in that economic regulation (explicitly excluded from the domain of the IMO and WP29) looms as large as safety regulation. The reason for this is that the air transport industry is structurally much more like telecommunications than are sea or road transport. Just as almost every nation has its own telecommunications carrier (and rarely more than one), almost every nation has a flagship airline (and rarely more than one). The state controls landing rights (just as it tends to control the telecommunications infrastructure) and rations those rights, usually in ways that favour the national flag-carrier. In comparison, the delivery of sea and road travel is much more decentralized, access to the sea and the roads less rationable.

History of Globalization

ICAN-IATA

The First World War developed the recent invention of the aeroplane into a vehicle that could be used for commercial transport. So at the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, the International Convention for Air Navigation was signed and the International Commission for Air Navigation (ICAN) created. ICAN was concerned with technical coordination on matters such as the rules for the safe operation of airports, radio communications and the like (what later came to be known as flight standards). The year 1919 also saw the first incarnation of the International AirTransport Association (IATA), an association of European airlines that admitted its first US member in 1938. Before the Second World War IATA was not involved in the regulation of fares, being preoccupied with reaching agreement on the procedures for handling air traffic.

As with shipping, regulation of the design safety of aircraft was initiated by insurers. In the US, Underwriters Laboratories, at the request of the National Aircraft Underwriters’ Association, formed an aviation department in 1920 to certify the airworthiness of aircraft and develop airworthiness standards (Cheit 1990b: 79), a function ultimately taken over by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

ICAO-IATA

The degree of globalization of regulation was quite limited until the Second World War because air travel was mainly regional. After the Second World War trans-Atlantic flight became commonplace in the wake of the huge technical leap in aviation delivered by the war. US President Roosevelt saw this coming and convened the International Civil Aviation Conference in Chicago in 1944.