William Langewiesche and “Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight”

William Langewiesche is known to readers of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair‎ as a kind of Jack London figure, a writer of sturdy, authoritative tales of modern life at the moral, technological and geographic margins. Among his subjects have been the U.S. presence in Baghdad; the black market in nuclear materials; piracy on the high seas; and life in the French Foreign Legion. He is perhaps best known for “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center,” his intimate and scarifying account of the cleanup and recovery efforts at Ground Zero.

Like John McPhee or James Fallows (another pilot), he finds more in his subject than one would have thought possible.

Almost forgotten beneath the laurels for a reporter who has been nominated for a National Magazine Award a dozen times — and won twice — is that Langewiesche got his start as an aviation writer.  He spent three years writing for “Flying” magazine, the industry’s journal of record, and his first book, the 20-year-old “Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight,” collects some of his early aviation pieces.

“Inside the Sky” allowed him to carve out a niche as a journalist and to explore the broader themes that would continue to dominate his writing even as he turned to other subjects and built a larger audience: enclosed masculine worlds; the meaning of physical courage; the culture of engineering; and the remoteness of the natural world and its dangers in a technological society.  It is a blueprint for the world as Langewiesche sees it.

A pilot himself, Langewiesche is the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, the author of “Stick and Rudder,” the nearest thing the pilot community has to a sacred text.  His boyhood experiences of flying with his father and his friends provided his earliest taxonomy of achievement.  He learned that the FAA can issue a certificate that permits you to fly but that it can’t make you a pilot, ‎and he learned that the view from the inside is different from the outside, in aviation or anything else.

In “Inside the Sky” he turns his experienced eye on what can go wrong in flight and on the process and politics of accident investigation.  Two of the pieces involve large scale aviation disasters: “On A Bombay Night,” which examines how an experienced pilot became spatially disoriented and flew a perfectly good Boeing 747 into the Arabian Sea; and “The Lessons of Valujet 592,” which investigates how a case of bureaucratic “pencil whipping” led to a catastrophic in-flight fire that brought a DC-9 down in the Everglades.

“Inside the Sky” is also, as its subtitle promises, “A Meditation on Flight.”  Langewiesche allows himself a paragraph or two in each story to ruminate on flying’s place in the modern world, how it can grip you, what it promises, and its tendency to expose character, for better and for worse, as in this pellucid bit in “The View From Above”:

The aerial view is something entirely new.  We need to admit that it flattens the world and mutes it in a rush of air and engines, and that it suppresses beauty.  But it also strips the facades 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.

Langewiesche grew up in New Jersey, but attended Stanford and, perhaps most critically, flew desert routes for several years as a young pilot.  That shaped him into a Western figure for whom integrity and self-reliance are the preeminent values.  He is also a man of broad learning and considerable acuity, particularly when it comes to the psychology of institutions.  ‎

In “The Lessons of Valuejet 592,” he brings the reader inside the NTSB and the FAA, the two federal agencies charged with regulating commercial air travel.  They are scarcely distinguishable to the public‎, but to Langewiesche they are the yin and yang of government.  For him the NTSB is a competent, professional organization of the kind of guys (accident investigation remains male-dominated) who can look you in the eye and shake your hand.  The FAA, on the other hand, is a pure product of Washington.  He writes in “Slam and Jam”:

An elevator carried me up to the mid-level, where I met the [air traffic control] tower’s chief, an immaculate man who wore cuff links and a well-tailored suit in the typically dandified style of the FAA management.  We sat in his government-issue office, with the clean desk and the coffee table, the soft chairs, the FAA seal, the flag, the picture of the president… The chief volunteered that Newark had in recent times led the nation in delays, but he said the airport had improved its record for the current fiscal year.  I asked him to be specific about the changes he had made.  He admitted that the improvement was due mostly to an unusual stretch of good weather.  I assured him that as a pilot I understood.

So here is the Langewieschian paradox: He is evidently of high intelligence, and the son of a man he has described as “an old world European intellectual” – and yet he seems to cultivate a certain contempt for bookishness.  In the eternal opposition between literature and life, he is all for life, all for responsibility and consequences, and especially for the natural world in its beauty and indifference.  Like many an adventurer before him, from Saint-Exupery to Norman Mailer to Jeremiah Tower, he got a first-class education and then turned his back on it in search of experience, working for years as a bush pilot, sometimes at the margins of the law.

Integrity for Langewiesche is bound up with the cultivation of risk, not in the sense of wanton recklessness but something measured twice and cut once, this much risk to career and status in return for this much institutional truth, this much risk to life and limb in return for this much quickening of pulse and freshened respect for the natural world.

He is of the Hemingway school of contempt for the effete and affected.  For him, the difference between the FAA and the NTSB is a gestalt.  The symbolic core of the NTSB’s work is done at crash sites, with the smell of jet fuel and sometimes death in the air.  For the FAA, that work is done in cubicles and conference rooms.  The crisp tailoring of FAA executives tells us all we need to know about their agency: It’s not for real.

Langewiesche is a reporter who takes sides.  He is a master portraitist, acute, economical ‎and witty, pitiless in the manner of Janet Malcolm.  Here is describing a Yale professor, Charles Perrow, a scholar of so-called systems accidents, in “The Lessons of Valuejet 592”:

At sixty-two, Perrow is a burly and disheveled man with a fleshy face and the dust of old rebellions about him.  He is affable, excitable, physically restless, strong, and no doubt a bit reckless.  I got the impression that his students must enjoy him.

And less admiringly, the head of the FAA at the time of the Valujet crash:

The FAA’s administrator then was a one-time airline boss named David Hinson, the sort of glib and self-assured executive who does well in closed circles of like-minded men.  Now, however, he would have to address a diverse and skeptical audience.  The day after the Valujet accident he had flown to Miami and made the incredible assertion that Valujet was a safe airline – when for 110 people dead in a nearby swamp it very obviously was not.  He also said, “I would fly on it,” as if he believed he had to reassure a nation of children.  It was an insulting performance, and it was taken as further evidence of the FAA’s isolation and its betrayal of the public’s trust.

Langewiesche is a faithful and reliable guide to both the teleological and engineering aspects of aviation.  This uniting of teleology and design, of matter and spirit, is at the core of his mission, one that spans all of his subjects.  He is strongly ambivalent about certain aspects of modern life, particularly the false promise of technology in which we are cocooned‎.  In the Valujet story, he writes:

We might now begin to see how the pretend realities lie falsely within our view like the old-fashioned parks of a formal landscape.  We can hide for awhile in our fantasies of agreement and control, but ultimately we cannot escape the vernacular terrain – the cockpits and hangers and auto body shops, the lonely lit farmhouses sailing backward through the night – where we continue to struggle through life on the face of a planet.

Aviation has always been a magnet for our broader anxieties about technology.‎  Those anxieties take two forms.  First, perhaps because of aviation’s symbolic proximity to the Icarus myth, we are inclined to feel that flight is a form of human arrogance, and that we perhaps get what we deserve when our machines fall to the ground.  Langewiesche does not deny that flight is a symptom of the human will to dominate our environment.  For him, though, this impulse is redeemed by flight’s tendency to return us to a proper relationship with nature, which for him must be characterized by humility.  “Inside The Sky” is in part a search for the telos of flight, as here in “The View From Above”:

We have come to the point in history not of an orderly existence but of something less expected… Flight’s greatest gift is to let us look around, and when we do, discover that the world is larger than we have been told and that our wings have helped to make it so. 

The second form of anxiety is more material and, in Langewiesche’s view, better founded: the sense that our machines have grown so complex that they are effectively our masters rather than our servants and that we cannot possibly anticipate all the chains of failure that can lead to accidents.  These so-called “normal accidents” and their unsettling implications are the meta-subject of “The Lessons of Valujet 592,” one of Langewiesche’s strongest pieces and a kind of summa of high-minded aviation writing.  Like John McPhee or James Fallows (another pilot), he finds more in his subject than one would have thought possible.

Langewiesche writes in a plain style, what one might think of as Serious American Magazine prose.  Serious American Magazine prose does not often risk rhetorical flourish, neologism, or extended metaphor.  But it takes a different kind of risk, by exposing the joints of thought.  Langewiesche abjures metaphor to the fullest degree possible, the way some purist magicians disdain the use of props, preferring to face their audience with only a deck of cards and pure religion.  This crisp paragraph in “The Stranger’s Path,” describing North America as seen from the pilot’s seat of a single-engine aircraft, is representative:

North, south, east, and west run the lines.  A fence, a farm road, a row of trees, the tight streets of a sleepy county seat, a uniquely American graffiti.  Only in the sky can we emerge from these surroundings to discover the scale of the experiment that has been worked upon us.  Looking outside while in flight we can find winding suburbs, and islands of preserved wilderness, and still-defiant deserts, but we would never mistake this country for an older or smaller world.

If there is one signal idea in the Langewiesche lexicon, it is “integrity.”  Integrity is what he admires and what he celebrates.  One of the passengers killed on Valujet 592 was Rodney Culver, a professional football player for the San Diego Chargers.  Langewiesche does not mention this fact.  Perhaps he simply was not aware of it.  I prefer to think, however, that as a matter of principle Langewiesche chose to grant each of the passengers in death an equality of dignity that they were not granted in life.  This seems to me like precisely the kind of thing Langewiesche would do, and answer inquiries impatiently about later.

Langewiesche does not deny that flight is a symptom of the human will to dominate our environment.  For him, though, this impulse is redeemed by flight’s tendency to return us to a proper relationship with nature, which for him must be characterized by humility.

This is not to say that Langewiesche’s idea of integrity is the same as everyone else’s.  Integrity for Langewiesche is bound up with the cultivation of risk, not in the sense of wanton recklessness but something measured twice and cut once, this much risk to career and status in return for this much institutional truth, this much risk to life and limb in return for this much quickening of pulse and freshened respect for the natural world.

Around any corner in his world one might find greatness.  Here he describes the conduct of the Indian judge who heard the case brought against Boeing in connection with the crash of Air India Flight 855 (“On A Bombay Night”), which Langewiesche argues was caused by simple pilot error:

Chandurkar… turned out to be an effective and intelligent questioner, unintimidated by the technical complexities of the case and unwilling to brook the double-talk of the interested parties – Air India, the pilots’ union, Boeing, and their various expert witnesses, along with a slew of American attorneys who had converged anxiously on Bombay to monitor the proceedings.  Chandurkar sorted through the conflicting testimonies with a fairness and certainty that ultimately won over all but the most partisan of observers.  The final report, written by Chandurkar himself, still stands as a quiet and credible piece of work, the expression of an almost naïve belief in the possibility of truth – this in contrast to the cynical rewriting of the story that took place later.

Our correspondent betrays his own sense of mission here. “[T]he quiet expression of an almost naive belief in the possibility of truth” — this could serve as a coda to the entire Langewiesche oeuvre.  In Langewiesche’s work, the simple grandeur of the natural world and the flawed grandeur of human purpose coexist uneasily, seeking forever some ungraspable unity.