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He won the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting for "The Crash of EgyptAir 990." Two years later "Columbia's Last Flight" took the same prize.
Five of his books have been published (they all include maps) and a new one—The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor—is forthcoming this spring from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. American Ground appeared as three sequential stories in TheAtlantic, and "transform[ed] the reputation of the magazine," notes publisher David Bradley. It also elicited visceral hostility from the New York firefighters and their supporters because of Langewiesche's reportage of firefighters'looting and clannishness on the pile. In May 2006, Langewiesche exchanged his slot on The Atlantic masthead as national correspondent for a spoton Vanity Fair's.
I flew with Langewiesche in his bush plane, lingered with him at the hangar, and sat with him in his home office in California where we probed the unsettled places of human experience in his work. But first, I had to ask:
Should we honestly believe that if we're in a plane going down that our seat cushions can be used as flotation devices?
There are plenty of cases of airplanes going into the water and people surviving. What to do in that case is not difficult to remember. Get the hell of out the plane and don't wear your high heels down the inflatable exit ramp.
You wrote in your book Inside the Sky that flying, like writing, "teaches the need for discerning patterns in a disorderly world." Is this how you approach journalism?
It's all about looking at the ground. All the patterns of life on earth are very exposed to the view from above. When you're in an airplane and you're looking down on the ground from above, it's very difficult for anybody to bullshit you. People build their front porches or plantations trying to impress the neighbors. Nobody is trying to impress pilots flying by. There is very little pretentiousness directed toward the sky. So you see things which are grand and glorious and wonderful, and things that are despicable. And you see them in their real relationship to one another.
Are you a pilot who writes or a writer who flies?
I'm a writer. Even when I was a pilot I was a writer. I read an enormous amount of material on what I'm working on but I never take notes on what I read. I don't even underline anymore. I just read and allow myself to forget what is naturally forgotten and remember what I remember. I feel no obligation to cite anything. I like my prose unburdened with apparatus. I take relatively few notes. I listen carefully. I like to use a recorder because it adds the ability to revisit things in a way taking notes doesn't. It's not a crutch, though it's a pain in the ass. I also prefer to do my own research. It makes my work less encyclopedic.
The truth is, you don't have to be smart to be a pilot. The best pilots are people who are dutiful, functional, golfers—hobbyists. They repair antique cars in their garages.
In the same book you talk about "suspended disbelief." What do you mean?
I said in my book that pilots must learn against all contradictory sensations the discipline of absolute belief in their instruments. Our greatest weakness is that we still lack an instinctive sense of bank. It can induce deadly spirals. Instinct is worse than the useless in the clouds. The first challenge is to suspend disbelief and trust your instruments over instinct.
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