How do I eliminate air craft usage in my story?

So I'm writing a fantasy story, and without going too much into detail, I want to eliminate the possibilities of people traveling by any type of air craft. I can't make "the technology is not that advanced yet" as an excuse, so I'm looking for something more like an external cause.

The world in my story is infinitely expanding, with various pieces of lands being separated by enormous wafts of ocean. The lands are also constantly "teleporting" to random places in the infinite world (which is mostly ocean) so in order to preserve a feeling of desperation in this world, (there are many technologically advanced lands) I want to rely on people traveling via the ocean rather than sky. It seems pretty dumb for people to use the ocean when they can use the sky to travel, so I'm kinda looking for ways to eliminate that sort of possibility. There are more detailed specifics on this setting but I don't really wanna reveal too much.

Any ideas or help? I've been trying to think of ideas for a while now...The story is fantasy so you can really say anything, and I'll try to see if I can gain some inspiration from here and modify some ideas.

Thank you

 

maybe there is certain pollution in the air if you go up too high, making it unable to be traversed?

 

No material ? Or Fuel or a safe runway for landing

 

Dragons or constant massive lightning storms maybe tornadoes or something

 

You can make it so gravity is unstable after 100ft height so flight is not possible.

It can also be unstable wind speeds after whatever calamity set the world back to what it is.
you already have unstable land it works since most of the land is breaking apart.

 

The land is constantly moving? That's a right pain if you're traveling by sea.

The quick way is to use electromagnetism and have it act up above a certain altitude, so that electronics don't function even if heavily shielded. That still allows you your advanced tech civilizations on other continents. Though it would mean that enterprising people would just low-fly.

Another way is to have the more ferocious beasts be avian and happen to love the sea, since they'd need a lot of sustenance and can only get it from the large sea creatures. They'd be attracted to aircraft for the annoyance and novelty.

If you really want to get nasty, you could have a gas that corrodes metals in the clouds/atmosphere at a certain height. That'd ensure that only ceramic/wood craft could work and those are hard to use for large amounts of people. You'd practically have to have magic be involved unless you went with a craft like a dirigible/zeppelin, which would make those avian creatures much more of a threat.

 

There once was a story I read that the world had gone through a magic revolution where magic replaced most of power sources. There were planes but they would be very expensive since it cost a mage using a lot of power on a very complex spell to move it through the sky. Or you could always make the sky inhabited by really strong monsters, hostile people, strong unpredictable weather,strange phenomenon like vortices, power fluxes or other things that would make it impossible to navigate through the sky. You could also just make it so government's outlaw air travel for some deep dark reason.

 

Why not make travel in general hard? Your landmasses are not fixed to one space thus would make navigating in general super hard. You can also pull the One Piece Grandline, but in air (although I feel it would work for inter landmass travel in your world) i.e. make it so things like compasses only work on land.

You can also maybe do like fluctuating air pressure above a certain altitude (although this solution doesn't account for low altitude flight) or maybe spatial rifts in the air? I personally think having air dominating beasts will be too hard unless you make them water beasts that have flying capabilities, but that would also make the waters dangerous. I also feel like highly advanced technological (assuming futuristic sci-fi) landmasses would have figured out teleportation or anti-gravity. You can also make the air disjointed, i.e. put insurmountable walls spanning across a large distance so that aircraft cannot travel meaningfully long distances. This would really play into the subnautical transportation, especially if your moving landmasses aren't connected to your world's crust.

 

Some kind of intrinsic environment thing that's restricted to the skies above the seas, like storms, or maybe the air is naturally too thin, poisonous, or foggy above a certain level. Personally, I think that one makes the most sense. Air predators also work, but since they should be able to move around, beyond their given setting of in the sky above the sea, especially since some landmasses are probably smaller and would be plagued by them. Perhaps you can make a fantasy creature which can't go below a certain altitude?

 

The rapid expansion of land and oceans cause change temperatures as in the air currents, raging from storms, cyclones, updraft, downdraft, thunderclouds ecc. The weather card can be played almost for everything. You can also add change in magnetic fields so it's mess radars or similar products so any travels above a certain height became dangerous and "almost" impossible (so you can have an excuses to pull a secret route for contrabands or similars thing)

 

If the lands are so far apart how they gonna have enough fuel? Even on earth a lot of long distance trips holding cargo are made by boats. Planes are faster, boats more fuel efficient and can also use sails

 

use a summoning circle to summon koko hekmatyr and her jormungandr system

 

That was one of my first attempts at trying to reason out of it. But given that civilizations can also grow more advanced by the century (even decade) I thought eventually someone would make some sort of aircraft that could travel large distances very quickly. I did some research on today's air crafts, and they can travel pretty fast already (fastest jet is like 2,100 mph so it'd take a day to travel 40k miles and the longest commercial airplane has flown for like 23 hours without refueling). So it just felt like eventually one day, some land would make something that could bypass fuel and material issues.

Hm. I would rather not as it seems like a bit too far fetched. That would mean massive lightning storms all over the sky all the time or pretty frequently which I don't really want. A dragon though, that can work I guess. A fantasy monster or creature that prevents air travel.

It's not really unstable land, its more like many continents and land pieces that are always moving. They're independent. The gravity choice is plausible though...

I think I got what you were saying...but a little confused. There isn't one land btw, its many lands independently moving. Can you explain the electromagnetism part a bit more?

 

The biggest challenge is if you make any specific reason why it won't work, it is easy for readers to think of a logical way to counter it. Okay how about this.

You have magic based technology, well that means it must require some sort of magic energy to function. A lot of stories go with a magic power core, but what if those don't exist in your world, or if they do they're too small to power anything as large as a vehicle. Instead your magic tech absorbs the energy it needs from the magical power that is constantly seeping out of the earth. This energy is most heavily concentrated on the ground and in the ocean, but dissipates very quickly the higher up you go, making any vehicle that isn't terrestrial or nautical impractical.

 

Maybe the higher you go you start to run into freaky space/magic radiation that gives magic cancer or mutates people into abominations/monsters

 

Maybe the distances are so close that travel by air isn't needed.

Or maybe have a lot of vicious monsters in the air like a replier previously said.

Or maybe make it so that air monsters were so common back then that ground units (like plants) evolved to intercept them. Just jumping is enough to encounter flak.

You can also have a large moon overhead such that any attempts at flight will lead you to get dragged right off the planet by the moon's gravity if you go high enough. On the flip side the gravity from that moon makes the current planet's gravity lighter so you can jump really far with little effort.

Make the terrain really mountainous? Helicopters are one thing but planes need a lot of room to maneuver in all 3 dimensions and if it's cloudy in the mountains...people die when flying when the plane hits unforeseen terrain

 

Even though its fantasy, I'm keeping "magic" pretty tightly under wraps and regulated by rules and laws. Magic is not really a usable source of energy. Also yes, I'm trying to keep things as logical as I can, so that's why I'm afraid if something sounds too much like a "cheat" or an easy way in my story. It's not sci-fi, so I'm not working everything out scientifically to the bone but you know, just a moderate amount of logic and reason.

Travel in general is reallly hard. it's super risky and people don't attempt unless needed in my story. But more on the Grandline, wdym by that?

 

If u have gods in ur story u can go in this direction and create some kind of lore

 

Basically the Grandline (as I remember it) is a stretch of ocean in One Piece that consists of islands that have strong enough magnetic pull that normal compasses don't work. The needle basically goes haywire and you can't tell general directions. A special type of compass lets you lock onto a certain magnetic frequency and that is how people travel in the Grandline.

 

Ahh, yea I read One Piece. Hm that's actually interesting. So it'd be like islands in the sky.