Television Up in the Air: The Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction, 1959–1971

Abstract

This paper examines the Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI), an educational television program that used airplanes to broadcast instructional television to schools across a six-state area in the Midwestern United States. The MPATI formed in 1959, telecast from 1961–1968, and officially dissolved in 1971. As this article argues, the history of the MPATI both challenges core assumptions about the uses and spaces of television and complicates our understanding of the development of the noncommercial television sector in the United States. The MPATI defined the social role, financial structure, mode of distribution, and geographical scope of television in ways that countered concurrent understandings of the medium. The MPATI removed television from the domestic sphere and placed it in the schools; it functioned as a regional broadcaster, evading the local–national binary that had come to define American television; it was to be funded by subscription fees, rather than sponsorship dollars, public monies, or philanthropic contributions. In addition, the MPATI's history complicates how we understand the development of the noncommercial television in the United States by exposing the diversity of the educational television sector in the period prior to the creation of the public broadcasting system.

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