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On a short runway in northern California, William Langewiesche is in the pilot's seat of his Husky A-1B bush plane. He's saying, "It's 38 degrees on oil. I won't take off with less than 100 degrees." We wait.
"L-M-N-O-P"—"They're putting in navigation points"—"Oscar 5"
"You hear that guy? Radios here are really busy. You hear a lot of chatter, which is really annoying."
We're still waiting for 100 degrees on oil. He's saying, "I just put on a new propeller. It's the best propeller out there, better climb performance, better drag performance. It's the sexiest thing around if you're into propellers. I was just in Russia doing all this stuff on nuclear proliferation and all I could think about was my new propeller."
From the sky over Northern California, flying at 2,000 feet with William Langewiesche, you see farmland in quadrants, the alluvial plain of the Sacramento Valley, coastal mountains and low clouds to the east. Then he flies low where the Husky is happiest. You see treetops, "red-neck trailers" on isolated hilltops, and cows. He says, "Okay, you're going to feel some disorientation now." At 1,901 you see only the red-lighted numbers 1-9-0-1 on the instrument panel because you're feeling g-load—negative 2 gs—and focusing on the instrument panel keeps you from throwing up. Soon he's saying, "When you're upside down it's all positive gs. You don't feel upside down. You're upside down now."
During Langewiesche's fifteen years at The Atlantic Monthly he wrote about disasters such as the crash of ValuJet 592 in the Florida everglades; the spiraling dive of EgyptAir 990 into the waters off Nantucket; the unbuilding of the World Trade Center Towers; the disintegration of the Columbia space shuttle. How? The organizing principle of the sky. His spatial orientation enables him to render otherwise untellable stories of crash sites, war zones, diving cockpits, and devastated people with dispassion and understatement that is fleet and spare, almost poetic.
His best pieces, he says, are stories that are metaphors conveying "the power of a tangible narrative that has a deeper meaning." His Atlantic cover story "The Crash of EgyptAir 990," which appeared in the aftermath of 9/11 (November 2001), was a metaphor for war. It was also The Atlantic's intentional response to the attacks of September 11. His piece titled "Eden: A Gated Community" (June 1999), about entrepreneur-turned-ecologist Robert Tompkins (champion of saving Chile's rain forest by buying up land and imposing his conservation experiment on the indigenous citizens), Langewiesche describes as "a classic missionary story." His piece "The Shipbreakers" (August 2000), about dismantling ship carcasses in Alang, India, wasametaphor for "imperialism dolled up as a left-wing cause." I asked what the ValuJet crash story represented. He said, "A paradox about how the pursuit of safety for safety's sake will kill you. 'Thou shalt not turn to government for all solutions and regulations.'"
He grew up "in the cockpit" in Princeton, New Jersey, son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, a celebrated pilot and an essayist in his own right. The father wrote the definitive primer for pilots, Stick and Rudder, which the son has never read. (You can buy online a "Wolfgang Langewiesche Is My Hero" bumper sticker.) Langewiesche's mother belonged to the "Nantucket Coleman family," which means on his mother's side he is remotely related to Benjamin Franklin. Langewiesche's first solo flight was in a glider at age fourteen.
He smokes Cuban cigars, a habit he picked up in Iraq, to the dismay of his beguiling 13-year-old daughter Anna. He possesses a dry wit—we laughed a lot—though it can sometimes be hidden by his otherwise taciturn bearing. He says he is not a religious man.
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