Cosmotechnics in the Skies

Boeing, Airbus and COMAC viewed as cosmologies

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Yuk Hui defines cosmotechnics as the unification of the cosmic order and moral order through technical activities. Technology, in this sense, is never universal. Each society develops machines and systems through its own cosmology, its own values and relations to the world. There is no single trajectory of technological progress; there are multiple cosmotechnics, each expressing a different way of binding culture to machines.

Aviation offers a clear lens to see these divergences. Aircraft are not only feats of engineering but embodiments of cosmotechnics: they reveal how societies imagine the relationship between humans and machines, between continuity and rupture, between pragmatism and systematization. Boeing reflects an American cosmotechnics of pilot mastery and incremental adaptation. Airbus expresses a European cosmotechnics of systemic integration and infrastructural rationalism. COMAC represents a new cosmotechnic struggling toward individuation, where technological sovereignty is the goal but imitation remains the starting point. And the Concorde illustrates the fragility of individuation: a technological marvel whose cosmotechnics could not root itself in a sustainable world.

Through these examples, the history of aviation unfolds as a history of cosmotechnics: rival philosophies of flight, some enduring, some still emerging, some already consigned to the ruins of failed futures.

Boeing: The Pilot as Master and the Logic of Continuity

The Boeing worldview has always been bound up with the mythology of the American pilot. From barnstormers in the interwar years to the test pilots who shepherded early jetliners into service, American aviation culture saw the pilot as a figure of mastery — someone who could wrestle a machine into submission through skill, daring, and judgment. This culture shaped Boeing’s design philosophy. Even as electronics and automation advanced, Boeing held to the principle that the machine should remain responsive to human command, never entirely closing the circuit of control.

Continuity followed naturally from this ethos. Instead of tearing up successful designs to begin anew, Boeing preferred to extend and adapt them. The 737 is the most striking example: a narrow-body jet launched in the 1960s that, through countless incremental upgrades, remains the backbone of global fleets today. Continuity promised familiarity for pilots and efficiency for airlines — but it also meant layering new systems onto old frameworks.

The cracks in this philosophy became visible in Boeing’s accident record. Rudder hardover incidents in the 1990s, and later the 737 MAX disasters, showed how decades of incremental fixes could produce machines that pilots no longer fully understood. The continuity that once ensured mastery began to betray it, as pilots found themselves contending with hidden software overrides or unexpected aerodynamic behaviors. Boeing’s cosmotechnics — a faith in human skill to bridge the gap between legacy machinery and new demands — collided with the realities of increasingly complex, opaque systems. The company’s adaptations often came after tragedy, revealing both the resilience and fragility of its commitment to continuity.

Airbus: Systems Rationalization and the Break with Tradition

Airbus emerged in the 1970s from a very different cultural and political background. As a pan-European consortium, it was a project of integration — of pooling national resources into a unified system. Its aircraft design reflected this logic. Instead of preserving the tactile authority of the pilot, Airbus reconceived the cockpit as a node in a larger technical system. With the A320 in 1988, it introduced digital fly-by-wire controls, shifting command from pilot muscles to computer mediation.

This was more than a technical innovation; it was a deliberate rupture with tradition. The sidestick replaced the yoke, mechanical feedback disappeared, and envelope protections ensured that no pilot could push the aircraft beyond its aerodynamic limits. Safety was collectivized and rationalized — not dependent on individual mastery, but on the predictability of systemic constraints.

Yet, the same philosophy produced its own risks. When Air France 447 crashed in 2009, the pilots faced an unfamiliar and confusing cascade of flight law changes after the autopilot disengaged. Their training had not prepared them for the opacity of the system. Here the very logic of rationalization — reducing margins of error through automation — exposed a new kind of vulnerability: when the system faltered, pilots were stranded without the deep continuity of experience that Boeing’s philosophy cultivated. Airbus’s cosmotechnics thus revealed its paradox: its effort to create collective safety could displace, even erode, individual comprehension.

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Regional Adaptations as Expressions of Cosmotechnics

The differences between Boeing and Airbus become even clearer when viewed through regional adaptations of their flagship aircraft.

• Boeing 747SR in Japan:
  In the 1970s, Japan’s domestic routes such as Tokyo–Osaka faced immense passenger density. Instead of designing an entirely new aircraft, Boeing modified its existing 747 into the “Short Range” variant. It sacrificed fuel capacity for structural reinforcement, allowing multiple daily cycles. This was a pragmatic, almost artisanal adaptation: a global platform adjusted to a specific regional need. It reflects Boeing’s cosmotechnics of continuity and pilot-centered pragmatism, a willingness to tweak and repurpose rather than to rethink from the ground up.

• Airbus A380 in the Gulf:
  By contrast, the A380 was conceived for a future of hub-and-spoke mega-airports. Its success was not in pragmatic tweaks but in regions like the Gulf, where airlines such as Emirates could build entire infrastructures — airports, terminals, flight networks — around its massive capacity. This was Airbus’s systemic philosophy at work on a regional scale: the aircraft did not adapt to infrastructure; infrastructure adapted to it. The A380 was a machine whose individuation was inseparable from the collective systems — political, economic, and architectural — that sustained it.

Taken together, these cases show how cosmotechnics inflect not just corporate design but the way machines live within cultural and regional ecosystems. Boeing thrives on incremental modification for local pragmatics; Airbus thrives when infrastructures bend to systemic rationalization. Both strategies reveal how technical objects are not simply engineered but culturally individuated.

COMAC: Sovereignty in the Skies and the Struggle for Individuation

The story of COMAC begins not in the skies but in the politics of sovereignty. In the late 20th century, as China’s economy opened to global markets, its skies were filled almost entirely with foreign aircraft. Boeing and Airbus dominated the fleets of Chinese airlines, and aviation became a daily reminder of technological dependency. By the early 2000s, Beijing resolved that this gap in capability could not remain: a nation that aspired to be a world power had to command its own skies with machines of its own making. Thus in 2008 the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) was born, not as a private company but as a state-backed project of autonomy, infused with the ethos of technological self-determination.

The ethos of COMAC was never about radical innovation. Unlike Airbus, which ruptured tradition with fly-by-wire, or Boeing, which cultivated continuity through the pilot’s hand, COMAC’s philosophy has been one of catching up — of reproducing proven designs while gradually substituting foreign components with domestic equivalents. Its flagship, the C919, resembles an Airbus A320 more than it departs from it, borrowing heavily in both design language and supplier networks. Engines, avionics, and other critical systems still largely come from Western firms. In Simondon’s terms, COMAC remains at an early stage of individuation, where margins of externality dominate — the machine is assembled more than it is concretized.

Yet this does not mean COMAC is a failure. Individuation is not only technical; it is collective and psychic. Each rollout of the C919, each test flight broadcast on state television, reinforces the collective sense that China is carving a path toward autonomy. The plane is as much a symbolic object as a technical one — a proof of capacity, a declaration of intent. Its individuation, then, lies not in perfected engineering but in the civilizational project it represents: that a culture with millennia of continuity will no longer accept being dependent on others to carry its citizens across the skies.

Still, the failures are evident. Certification delays, production challenges, and reliance on foreign suppliers reveal how difficult it is to cross the threshold into full technical autonomy. COMAC’s individuation remains stunted, bound by the very global supply chains it seeks to escape. Where Boeing and Airbus defined themselves by contrasting cosmotechnics — pragmatism and systemic rationalism — COMAC is still struggling to define its own, oscillating between imitation and aspiration.

The future of COMAC lies in whether it can concretize its machines, integrating components into coherent, autonomous systems rather than patchworks of borrowed technologies. If it succeeds, it may articulate a distinctly Chinese cosmotechnics of aviation, one that fuses state sovereignty with technical form. If it fails, it risks remaining a symbol without substance — a political project that individuates socially but not technically.

Concorde: A Supersonic Dream that Failed to Individuate

The Concorde was, in every sense, a child of ambition. Conceived in the 1960s as a joint venture between Britain and France, it promised to shrink the globe by flying faster than the speed of sound. The machine itself was breathtaking: a needle-nosed dart that leapt across the Atlantic in little more than three hours. It embodied the aesthetic of high modernism — technology not just as function, but as spectacle, as proof that progress could transcend natural limits.

Yet beneath its gleaming skin, the Concorde never found a stable mode of existence. In Gilbert Simondon’s terms, it remained overdetermined by its margins: economic, political, and environmental. Its engines roared with unmatched power, but consumed fuel at rates that made profitability elusive. Its sonic boom restricted it to oceanic routes, preventing wider infrastructural integration. And its symbolic aura as a luxury object limited its collective individuation: Concorde passengers were a narrow elite, not a broad public.

In this sense, Concorde lacked a cosmotechnics capable of sustaining it. Airbus, years later, could root its systems rationalization in the collective project of European integration. Boeing could extend its continuity philosophy through the pragmatism of American airlines. But Concorde floated between these worlds. It was European, yet not integrative — a bilateral collaboration rather than a systemic one. It was technically extraordinary, yet socially thin — admired, but never woven into everyday life.

The crash of Air France Flight 4590 in 2000 was not the sole reason Concorde disappeared, but it became the symbolic moment when its fragile individuation collapsed. Airlines could no longer justify operating an aircraft that was at once expensive, noisy, fuel-hungry, and politically awkward in an era increasingly defined by environmental consciousness. By 2003, the Concorde retired, a relic of a future that never fully arrived.

What remains of the Concorde is not a living technics but a ghost — a reminder that not every technical object, however dazzling, achieves individuation. Without the cultural, economic, and infrastructural ecosystem to sustain it, even the most advanced machines can become dead ends. The Concorde showed that technology alone does not guarantee survival; it must be embedded within a cosmotechnics that binds people, politics, and machines into a coherent world.

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The skies are full of machines, but each machine carries more than passengers; it carries a worldview. Boeing embodies an American cosmotechnics of continuity and pragmatism, where the pilot remains master and adaptation is incremental, even when strained by crisis. Airbus, by contrast, reveals a European cosmotechnics of rupture and systematization, embedding human skill within a larger network of rationalized automation and infrastructural design.

COMAC, still in the process of individuation, points to another possibility: a Chinese cosmotechnics that seeks sovereignty by absorbing and reconfiguring external technologies, an experiment in forging a path between imitation and originality. Its struggle shows that cosmotechnics are not only inherited but also made, tested in the friction between ambition and ecology.

And then there is Concorde — a reminder that not every individuation succeeds. Supersonic flight dazzled, but it lacked the infrastructural, cultural, and economic foundations to survive. The object remained technically brilliant but cosmotechnically isolated, a shard of futurism without a world to sustain it.

Seen together, these trajectories remind us that aviation is not merely a field of engineering but a theater of cosmotechnics: different societies negotiating how humans and machines should live together, how memory and risk are distributed, how the future is imagined. Some succeed in individuating, some fail, and some are still becoming — but each leaves a trace in the sky, a philosophy written in flight.