Episode Details

In December 1944, while World War II still raged, 52 nations gathered in Chicago to write the rules for the post-war sky. The result was the Chicago Convention and the creation of ICAO — the International Civil Aviation Organization. This episode explores how that moment drew a legal firewall between military and civilian aviation, why that separation was essential for the commercial airline industry to exist at all, and how the system holds together when a 747 strays into Soviet airspace. From Article 3's deliberately vague "due regard" clause to the invisible choreography of civil-military airspace coordination, we unpack the architecture of the sky we fly through every day.