From Podes to Antipodes: Positionalities and Global Airline Geographies Matthew A. Zook and Stanley D. Brunn Department of Geography, University of Kentucky Questions of cost and time distance have long been of interest to geographers and have become a more central concern as globalization advances. We analyze the global air travel system by examining the differences in the costs, distances, and times of one aspect of globalization. We review the extant literature on airline transportation by geographers and others, noting especially the near-century-long interest in unraveling cost, time, and distance issues and designing innovative ways to map these interrelated variables. We expand on this base to bring recent scholarship on power and positionality of cities to our understanding of air travel. Our analysis expands on previous work on airline transport geographies in four distinct ways. First, we developed an international database for a large number of cities worldwide that includes measures of distance, cost, frequency and flight duration of airline connections. Second, this database is examined statistically through ordinary least squares (OLS) re- gressions to measure variations in airline volume with selected socioeconomic variables. Third, these global airline data are mapped using conventional mapping techniques, and finally, we prepare a set of ‘‘position-grams’’ or intersecting spheres of regional variation that measure and map regional patterns and variations in airline connectedness. Key Words: global cities, innovative cartography, power geometry, transport geography, wormholes. Air is anywhere and forms an everywhere continuous and entirely uninterrupted base of traffic, whereas water and land surfaces interpenetrate. ... Without any doubt, therefore, air is the most perfect way of communication and makes possible the noblest and freest method of transport. This element, however, seems to be reserved for future times of greater inventiveness in which human intercourse will reach its highest perfection, its mightiest development and its greatest freedom. —(Kohl 1841) Human curiosity about traveling to places near and distant usually raises three questions: How far is it from point A to point B? How long does it take to travel between these two points? And what is the cost? These questions were raised by the earliest humans who were interested in exploring nearby familiar and distant un- familiar places. They were precisely the same questions that stimulated explorations and discoveries of unknown continents, seas, and empty spaces for the past several millennia. And these same questions about time, dis- tance, and cost appear when we listen to possibilities about traveling or communicating with other planets and galaxies (Davis 2000). While seemingly simple, these questions turn on any number of elements in- cluding physical landscapes, technologies, and places’ positions relative to power relations. Geographers have long addressed the nature and or- ganization of human movement across distant spaces and the space-transcending technologies that have fa- cilitated this. The innovation of civilian air travel in the twentieth century in particular radically altered concepts of distance and made the world seem to be a ‘‘smaller’’ place. Smaller, however, does not mean uniform, and the global cities literature clearly shows (see Knox and Taylor 1995; Beaverstock, Smith, and Taylor 2000; Sassen 2001; P. J. Taylor, Catalano, and Walker 2002) that cities remain hierarchically organized at global and national levels. This high level of interest in global cities, the ever-increasing use of airline transport, and ongoing structural adjustments in airline industry (deregulation, bankruptcies, rise of low-cost airlines, etc.) suggest the time is propitious to examine the costs, distances, and times of airline travel from a global perspective. To place our analysis in context, we review the extant literature on airline transportation by geographers and others, noting especially the near-century-long interest in unraveling cost, time, and distance issues and de- signing innovative ways to map these interrelated vari- ables. We expand on this base to bring recent scholarship on power and positionality of cities to our understanding of air travel. Our study extends and expands on previous work on airline transport geographies in three distinct ways. First, we have developed an international database for a large number of cities worldwide that includes measures on the distance, cost, frequency, and flight duration of airline connections. Previous studies were Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(3), 2006, pp. 471–490 r 2006 by Association of American Geographers Initial submission, August 2004; revised submission, December 2005; final acceptance, January 2006 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.