Aviation Report: An Example of Honesty, and One of Deceit.

William Langewiesche, famed writer and aviator, was the real thing. The man chosen to lead US aviation is not.

From 2008, William Langewiesche when teaching at a writing seminar in Italy. Langewiesche, a brilliant writer and reporter, seemed immortal. Sadly he died this weekend, of cancer, at age 70. (Photo Marco Di Lauro/Getty.)

It is hard for me to believe that William Langewiesche has died. Through my own lifetime I have never known a more vividly alive person. I will always think of him that way.

William earned celebrity in two different realms, whose memberships don’t usually overlap.

Within the tight world of aviation, the distinctive name ‘Langewiesche’ immediately got people’s attention, in the way a Lindbergh or Earhart or Yeager also might. William’s father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, was born in Germany in 1907 and came to the US as a student in the 1920s. In the US he learned to fly, became a test pilot, and in 1944, while in his 30s, wrote a book that is still in print, and that most people who have ever flown a plane have read or at least heard of.

The book is Stick and Rudder, which is to flying what The Elements of Style was for many years in writing courses. Part of its staying power is the unadorned elegance of its prose, one of several traits the elder Langewiesche shared with his son. There’s a sample in the notes below.¹

From our household copy of Stick and Rudder, which I pored over when learning to fly and have re-read every few years. This illustration shows the different “flare” angles that planes approaching at different speeds need to use when landing.

It was thanks to his father, who took the young William for flights around their home in Princeton, that William was such a natural in the air. He became comfortable at the controls of an airplane around the age other children become comfortable on their bikes. By law he couldn’t get his Private Pilot certificate until age 17. But he was ready long before.

To see him at the controls, as I did on a number of flights together from the 1990s onward, was like seeing a rider who’d grown up in the saddle. And to have him judge your own piloting skills, as he tolerantly did for me once when I was practicing for an instrument-rating check ride, was … like knowing that Roger Federer was watching you flail your way around the court.

So William was first known in the flying world for his name, and then for the aviation stories he wrote in Flying and elsewhere. But by the time he was in his 30s, he had won acclaim from a huge audience beyond the aviation world, and throughout our writers’ craft as well. Journalists’ influence is mainly writ-in-water. I think William’s work and example may last.²

Probably because it seemed “too easy” to him, William tended to downplay his work about aviation. “Oh, right, ‘the master of disaster’ ” he told me, self-mockingly, after I’d complimented one of his many pieces about airline calamity. (It was this one.) I resisted telling him that of all his books I liked Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight the best.

His first big “crossover” piece, which was based on William’s flying experience but was embraced by readers in general, was The World in Its Extreme. As his friend and editor Cullen Murphy recounts in a lovely appreciation here, it arrived at The Atlantic Monthly’s offices in 1991 as an over-the-transom, 20,000-word narrative. It ended up running as a two-part Atlantic cover story, and was a finalist for that year’s National Magazine Award.

Here is how that piece began. These were the first words of William’s first piece for the magazine that would publish so many of them through the next 15 years.

The Sahara is a desert so vast that no airplane can diminish it. Certainly this one couldn't. I sat behind the pilots in the cockpit of an Air Algeria turboprop lumbering at 18,000 feet across southern Algeria. The airplane was a Dutch-built Fokker 27, a stodgy forty-passenger twin, doing 220 miles an hour; it had come from the capital city, Algiers, on a roundabout three-day run to the oases. Now we were bound for Adrar, an oasis remarkable even here for heat and lack of rain.

It was midday, midsummer. Outside the Sahara stretch in naked folds to the horizon, brilliant and utterly still. It was blanketed by a haze of dust, suspended not by winds but by heat. The only sign of people was a trace of smoke rising in the distance. Below us a canyon cut through the downslope of the Hoggar Mountains. To the south lay the Tanezrouft, a plain so barren that drivers in the open desert mistake stones for diesel trucks, and so lonely that, it is said, migrating birds land beside people just for the company.

The captain wore a white shirt with epaulets. He had pasty skin and the look of an experienced pilot -- bored, dissatisfied, underexercised. He flew with sloppy control motions, like someone enduring a machine that he does not like.

The tone, the sensibility, the effortless sardonic touches, the transport to a world most of his readers had barely imagined—these notes that would characterize a Langewiesche piece were there from the start.

Here is another set of opening words, which I think revealed a lot about what made his work exceptional. These are from Inside the Sky, and they concern an aspect of seeing that William and I often discussed. Namely, “the aerial view.”

This is the view-from-above that captivates most people, the first time they encounter it. And that is infinitely more breathtaking from inside a slower, smaller aircraft, traveling closer to the ground, than from an airliner 30,000 feet up, through the scratchy pane at Seat 27F. Or even Seat 1A.

Notice how William introduced it. At half a dozen points in these opening pages of the book I thought, This is like watching Federer:

Mechanical wings allow us to fly, but it is with our minds that we make the sky ours… This book is a travel book about that place [in the sky], and it takes the form of a spiral climb. At the end it will arrive overhead of the point where now it begins, with the idea that flight's greatest gift is to let us look around….

The aerial view is something entirely new…. It strips the façades from our constructions, and by raising us above the constraints of the treeline and the highway it imposes a brutal honesty on our perceptions. It lets us see ourselves in context, as creatures struggling through life on the face of a planet, not separate from nature, but its most expressive agents. It lets us see that our struggles form patterns on the land, that these patterns repeat to an extent which before we had not known, and that there is a sense to them.

Discovering that sense requires not only that we look outside while flying but that we get over the illusion of smallness, the "Everything looks like a toy!" that blinds us at first to what we see.

I write "us" but frankly mean "them" or "you." The truth is I can only imagine learning to see from the air, because my father was a pilot with pilot friends, and I grew up inside their airplanes, gazing at the world below.

Day after day through the seasons and years we wandered the sky, and I sat looking outside. To make the time pass I picked points on the airplane--a strut, a rivet, a fairing on the leading edge of a wing--and used those points as sighting devices against the ground to measure the airplane's speed and to define flight's independent paths across the landscape: for a while along a country lane, but then straight across a field and through someone's swimming pool, over a factory, into a city and out again. It was quite early in my childhood, as these unusual paths began effortlessly to fit together, that I developed a pilot's integrated sense of the earth's geometry.

This was in the 1960s, the merest moment after the Wright brothers. When I first flew alone, in a sailplane at the age of fourteen, the experience seemed so normal to me that I have practically no memory of it now. It wasn't until college, when I took an air-taxi job and began carrying passengers for hire, people unaccustomed to flight, that I realized there was anything unusual about the view. Of course, some passengers did not want to look outside. But others were curious.

For me it was like witnessing Stone Age people seeing photographs for the first time, getting used to the scale, then turning with growing excitement from the magic to the content of the picture.

The truth is … Through the seasons and years we wandered the sky… From the magic to the content… William Langewiesche applied the magic of the aerial view to every subject he addressed. His life was complicated, as he would be the first to acknowledge. But he was the real thing.

His words remain, to remind us of how to look around, and see.

---

A Fake as FAA Nominee.

A lot of your life is public if you’re a pilot. The FAA maintains an online database where you can look up anyone who has trained to fly. George W. Bush? Affirmative. John Kerry? Yes. Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise or John Travolta? Angelina Jolie or Kenny G? You can find them all. You can even find a listing for the late Justice John Paul Stevens, an active aviator through much of his career. (The FAA maintains these records for some years after a flyer’s death. Stevens died six years ago.)