PW profiles William Langewiesche

William Langewiesche has built a career navigating intricate subjects with a pilot’s spatial orientation—no surprise considering his lifelong relationship with flight, a relationship that culminates with this week’s publication of Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), as well as the announcement of a forthcoming collection of aviation-related pieces, Aloft, to be published as a Penguin U.K. Modern Classic in February 2010.

If you’re wondering, yes, it is “a rare event,” notes Penguin U.K. editor Helen Conford, that a writer in the prime of his career is included in the Modern Classics series—an honor usually reserved for writers whose work has already proved to be enduring: Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Capote. “Penguin Modern Classics publishes only those authors whose writing they believe will be recognized in a hundred years’ time,” she says.

How will Langewiesche be remembered 100 years from now? The Penguin catalogue dubs him “one of the leading writers of the New New Journalism.” Jonathan Galassi, Langewiesche’s editor at FSG, says the author’s work is timeless because it eschews pack journalism and embodies “the intrepidity, vigor, originality, and courage” that was once “the stock in trade of a certain kind of reporter earlier in the century.”

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter characterizes Langewiesche’s gifts succinctly: “He’s got balls for bookends,” Carter says.

Although he chooses to downplay his aviation experience, Langewiesche is a pilot and says he virtually “grew up in a cockpit.” His father, Wolfgang, was a central figure in American flight, a German immigrant who became a WWII test pilot and the author of a classic 1946 flight manual, Stick and Rudder, still considered perhaps the best technical flying manual. “Growing up, I flew with all my father’s friends in everything from open cockpit biplanes to jets to helicopters,” Langewiesche says. “As a child, I lived and breathed airplanes.” He flew his first solo flight at age 14 and worked his way through Stanford University as a pilot, flying for small private airlines. “But I never wanted to be a pilot,” he stresses. “I wanted to be a writer, like John McPhee, who was my idol. That didn’t work out quite so easily. I had to go through 10 years of professional flying and struggling with writing before I was able to leave and concentrate on writing.”

His writing career—not coincidentally—launched at Flying magazine in New York, an aeronautics industry trade magazine. After nearly three years there, an editor at Random House encouraged him to leave and “get serious about writing,” Langewiesche recalls. “So I went into the wilderness of writing for about eight years, maybe more, during which I wrote and submitted various things that were not good. I wrote a novel that was bad. I rewrote the novel—it was still bad. But I was learning—writing every day. Mostly out of desperation, because I knew if it didn’t work out, I was going to have to be a pilot, and I didn’t want to do that.”

Langewiesche got his break when an unsolicited piece about the Sahara sent to the Atlantic landed on the desk of Cullen Murphy. After revisions, in November 1991, that piece “The World in the Extreme,” landed on the cover. In 2006, after a 15-year run with Murphy at the Atlantic, Langewiesche left for Vanity Fair, and got a bonus when his longtime editor joined him. “We went at the same time, but not as a package,” Langewiesche explains. “Cullen has his reasons for going, and I had my reasons, but they weren’t the same. It was just a very lucky thing for me. Cullen Murphy is the great editor right now in the magazine world.”

No question Murphy has been a strong literary copilot. At the Atlantic, Langewiesche was nominated eight consecutive times for National Magazine Awards, winning in 2002 for his piece on the crash of Egypt Air 990. He has been nominated twice more since joining Vanity Fair as an international correspondent, in 2006, winning in 2007. He has tackled the nuclear arms trade in Russia; the cleanup and recovery efforts at Ground Zero; captains who’ve gone down with their ships; Pakistani bomb-making metallurgists; the Balkans; Somali pirates; anarchy on the streets of São Paolo, Brazil; and the tragedy in Haditha, Iraq.

Although he says he has never intentionally focused his work on matters related to flight, the fact remains that he has written enough to fill a Penguin Modern Classic—and he has written extensively about most of the major air disasters of the past few decades: the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 into the Everglades; the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia; a midair collision at 37,000 feet; and the mysterious downing over the Atlantic of Air France Flight 447. His most recent effort, Fly by Wire, is the story behind Chesley Sullenberger’s successful ditching of US Airways flight 1549 into the Hudson River after its engines were disabled by a flock of geese.

“Yes, it takes place around aviation,” Langewiesche says of Fly by Wire, “but it’s more of a literary exercise than that. With this subject, like any subject, if you really explore it, instead of just saying, 'what an amazing act of heroism,’ which is what the major press coverage was, it becomes a window into our times.”

Fly by Wire, notes Galassi, “is William’s elegy for the pilot.” Indeed, it is a page-turner that breaks down everything: a seemingly suicidal flock of geese; the grind of airline life; the mind-boggling technology of a controversial airplane, the Airbus A320, a plane that is designed to prevent panicking pilots from screwing up. That Sullenberger and his copilot, Jeffrey Skiles, allowed the machine to do the work it was programmed to do saved the plane, and countless lives. In a nod to the pilot’s nobility, however, just before impact, Sullenberger raised the plane’s nose a touch—a critical move that bought passengers a little more time to escape the icy Hudson.

Despite an expense account from Vanity Fair that would enable him to fly business class and check into posh hotels, he flies coach to locations that often have no hotels. Langewiesche’s recent work, Murphy says, focuses on the inability of governments to control their societies. “William has been writing more about how new structures are emerging to keep anarchy at bay.”

With issues like anarchy front and center, Langewiesche will find no shortage of subjects in the coming years—a time he sees as a “golden age” for long-form nonfiction. Future editors of the Penguin Modern Classics series, unfortunately, may not be getting any updates to Aloft—Langewiesche says Fly by Wire is probably his last book about aviation, although he acknowledges all that flying has done for him.

“I have editors that for 20 years have never pressured me to write short and snappy,” Langewiesche explains. “Maybe that’s because I was a pilot and I didn’t have to do the short, snappy stuff to pay my rent. I had a skill that had nothing to do with writing and that allowed me to make income and have enough time to write. It’s a peculiar circumstance that allowed things to work this way.”