Inside The Sky: A Meditation On Flight

Langewiesche tells us how flight happens--what the pilot sees, thinks, and feels.  His description is not merely about speed and conquest.  It takes the form of a deliberate climb, leading at low altitude first over a new view of a home, and then higher, into the solitude of the cockpit, through violent storms and ocean nights, and on to unexpected places in the mind.

In Langewiesche's hands it becomes clear, at the close of this first century of flight, how profoundly our vision has been altered by our liberation from the ground.  And we understand how, when we look around, we may find ourselves reflected in the grace and turbulence of a human sky.

William Langewiesche's life has been deeply intertwined with the idea and act of flying.  Fifty years ago his father, a test pilot, wrote Stick and Rudder, a text still considered by many to be the bible of aerial navigation.  Langewiesche himself learned to fly while still a child.  Now he shares his pilot's-eye view of flight with those of us who take flight for granted—exploring the inner world of a sky that remains as exotic and revealing as the most foreign destination.

Langewiesche tells us how flight happens—what the pilot sees, thinks, and feels.  His description is not merely about speed and conquest.  It takes the form of a deliberate climb, leading at low altitude first over a new view of a home, and then higher, into the solitude of the cockpit, through violent storms and ocean nights, and on to unexpected places in the mind.

In Langewiesche's hands it becomes clear, at the close of this first century of flight, how profoundly our vision has been altered by our liberation from the ground.  And we understand how, when we look around, we may find ourselves reflected in the grace and turbulence of a human sky.

Publishers Weekly

The son of a pilot who wrote a classic book on aerial navigation, Langewiesche spent much of his childhood in the passenger seats of his father's and friends' aircraft, contemplating the process of flight and gazing at the landscape below. A cockpit prodigy who flew solo at 14, Langewiesche has been both a professional pilot and an author (Sahara Unveiled), and is also a foreign correspondent for Atlantic Monthly. Writing with poetic authority, he uses this "meditation" to unfold, partially, the mysteries of flight, and to recommend flight as a metaphor for understanding elements of the human condition. Occasionally, the metaphor seems only tangentially connected to the subject, though overall this is an enlightening, often riveting work. What happens to an aircraft and its contents during a turn will surely prompt many an amateur physics experiment aboard commercial airliners. A familiar and curious effect of flight, in which passengers and pilots lose their senses of gravity and direction, is explored in its most tragic form, as in the case of a 1978 Air India flight from Bombay to Dubai, whose pilot, a 22-year veteran, flew "a perfectly good airplane into the water." In quiet prose whose steady meter helps build a sense of mounting terror, Langewiesche explains how the pilot managed to ignore working instruments while relying on a single faulty one. Elsewhere, an in-depth examination of the infamous demise of Valuejet Flight 592, which caught fire and plunged into the Everglades in 1996, presents an eloquent and powerful argument for re-regulation of the airline industry. Part expos, part idyll, this is a meditation to savor.

William Langewiesche is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.  A professional pilot for many years, he is the author of Cutting for Sign and Sahara Unveiled (both available from Vintage Books). He lives in California.