William Langewiesche, 1955-2025
Image credit Internaz
I was saddened to see that William Langewiesche, the writer and long-form journalist, has died at 70. His was one of those bylines that I’d learned to get excited about a few times a year over the last decades, especially on topics related to aviation. He began his career as a pilot, and used that credibility to establish himself as the unofficial interpreter of flight–and flight disasters–for educated, literary audiences in the English-speaking world.
Judging by his recent work, he was very much still in the game. But Langewiesche was far more than a writer about airplanes. And what was that more? Not a writer who stuck to a competency earned through first-hand experience, but a writer whose technical skills revealed a more general comfort with complexity. In stepping out of his lane, he performed a demystification of expertise. Langewiesche’s early life as a pilot required an instinctive comfort with detail. But what set him apart was not his command of the details but his drive to understand them, to integrate them into an ever-widening but credible synthesis. All of these traits made him the ideal writer for an increasingly technological moment.
Langewiesche was a nonfiction writer who showed surprising range, but he was not a generalist on the level of, say, John McPhee.1 In a sense he wrote many versions of the same story. Complexity is one of the defining conditions of the modern age. What happens when it is ignored, denied or misunderstood? This problem has its mythic qualites. It is often a story about what happens when human actors–mortals–lose sight of their limits, when they are reminded of their capacity for error and the ever-present possibility of the rare event.
The premodern version of the story is about a figure who thinks that he is ‘fortune’s child,’ that the Fates find him exceptional. “The Fates:” a force with a face. They can be fickle, but they can also smile upon him. The modern characters in Langewiesche’s pieces are often the immediate participant in some spectacular disaster, but they fear neither the capriciousness of gods nor chance. Systems of planning and control mean that they fear what they can anticipate.2 But any event that is sufficiently strange might be indistinguishable from the intervention of fate. You can deny the existence of ill fate, bad omens, and bad luck. But bad things–very bad things–will still happen. Many of Langewiesche’s pieces are about what happens when some strange event enters, when it leaps straight from the unimaginable into reality.
Aviation is one of the most spectacular activities that human beings have turned into a routine pursuit. Maybe this is why the eruption of an accident inspires such fascination. The thoroughness of the pilot and the aviation system becomes a form of ritual. When the unexpected still breaks through, it has a supernatural quality to it, like the revenge of an angry spirit. From his origins in flight, Langewiesche was well positioned to ponder rare events across what has been called the “technosphere,” the thin but planet-spanning layer of engineered systems and institutions that make the earth habitable.3 Langewiesche wrote about breaks in this worldwide, interconnected safety net that were so unbelievable–a plane disappears in clear skies, the biggest ships ever built disintegrated by a hurricane–that they call out for an equally comprehensive interpretation.
We will need more technical interpreters like Langewiesche.4 Today there is no shortage of writers offering to explain some arcane technology (AI, quantum computing, nuclear fusion, geoengineering, clean tech, etc.) for a general audience. But it is rare to find someone who has the resources and temperament to seriously learn a subject. There are many reasons for this: the time and money for full-immersion writing is harder to come by. More technical systems are locked behind layers of non-disclosure and corporate opacity. On a cultural level, technological progress has created specialist “workers” with what looks like an induced inarticulacy. Not professionals with a sense of independence and vocation, but employees with a predisposed indifference to what is really going on. Software, an abstraction that now intermediates nearly everything, offers a structural discouragement to broad-minded thinking. For computing–which is badly in need of more knowledgeable writers–the incentives to explain and open up are compromised by the race for market supremacy and the big payday. Those who are capable of doing the work are more caught up than ever in “winning”–and less inclined than ever to reflect on it. The result is that the internet is filled with middling accounts of systems that lack crucial detail, most of them written by generalists who probably spend more time reading one another than being embedded in the sites, machines, and situations about which they write.
One of the more insidious solutions that popular writers have found to the problem of technical complexity is to transform it into a personality drama. Most readers of modern journalism are familiar with this imperative, even if we haven’t noticed the change. Any sufficiently dry subject can be spiced up with the right charistmatic personalities. Narrative intrigue takes the place of systems thinking–or any other conceivable approach to the subject. Writing about technology in popular journalism today can–by no accident–be surprisingly movie-ready. In this respect Langewiesche’s career is instructive. A prescient 1997 piece in the Atlantic, on the failings of the air traffic control system, contains just one named character who appears to be in pseudonym (“the center of the operation was a slight young man with blond hair and birdlike reactions, whom I will call Dobkin”). By the mid-2010s, more of Langewiesche’s work is filled with proper names, personal backstories, and speculation about the psychological flaws of the individuals involved. Langewiesche was, no doubt, writing to standards that his editors demanded, and to the apparent expectations of his readers. With time, I hope the archive of his work will show that other ways of writing about complexity are possible, that a writer can be compelling while still getting to the bottom of things. And, finally, that the gap between public understanding and actual understanding can be a lot smaller than it is now.
Further Reading:
Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight (book, 1999)
Slam and Jam (Atlantic Magazine, October, 1997)
William Langewiesche and Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight (Nieman, 2018)
McPhee was one of Langewiesche’s models when he was trying to become a published writer. ↩︎
One of Langewiesche’s last published pieces was on the “war games” conducted by the Pentagon to simulate a nuclear exchange, and the uncontrollable chain of events that would be expected to follow from the use of nuclear weapons in a real conflict. ↩︎
From The Unbearable Burden of the Technosphere: “The technosphere…comprises not just our machines, but us humans too, and the professional and social systems by which we interact with technology: factories, schools, universities, trade unions, banks, political parties, the internet. It also includes the domestic animals that we grow in enormous numbers to feed us, the crops that are cultivated to sustain both them and us, and the agricultural soils that are extensively modified from their natural state to carry out this task. The technosphere also includes roads, railways, airports, mines and quarries, oil and gas fields, cities, engineered rivers and reservoirs. It has generated extraordinary amounts of waste-from landfill sites to the pollution of air, soil and water. A proto-technosphere of some kind has been present throughout human history, but for much of this time, it took the form of isolated, scattered patches that were of little planetary significance. It has now become a globally interconnected system - a new and important development on our planet.” Accessed 2025-06-18. ↩︎
Langewiesche himself was following an example set by his father, Wolfgang, whose Stick and Rudder (1944) is still one of the canonical books on the craft of flying ↩︎