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Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight by William Langewiesche
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Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight

by William Langewiesche

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Subtitle notwithstanding, this is less a meditation on flight than a collection of articles about it. The articles vary in subject matter, tone, and--to be honest--success. Langewiesche, a regular contributor to Atlantic Monthly, is at his best when he's writing in journalistic mode. His dissection of why a veteran Air India captain flew his plane into the sea is fascinating, and his use of the ValuJet 592 crash in the Everglades (which becomes a meditation on the risks involved in flying) is even better. Oddly, the least successful segments are the most personal, reflective ones. The son of a flier who literally "wrote the book" on stick-and-rudder skills and a pilot himself since childhood, Langewiesche frequently calls attention to the distinction between "us pilots" vs. "you non-pilots." Other pilot authors--Antoine de St. Exupery, Ernest K. Gann, Richard Bach--have done the same, but as a prelude to saying "let me tell you about my world." Langewiesche is less welcoming. He insists so strongly, and so often, on the distinction that the effect is distancing and, for me, ultimately off-putting.

There is much in this book to interest readers, pilots or not, who love flying. Individual parts are better than the whole, however, and the whole falls well short of aviation classics like Wind, Sand, and Stars, Fate is the Hunter or Nothing By Chance. ( )
ABVR | Feb 15, 2008 |  
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Amazon.com (ISBN 0679429832, Hardcover)

William Langewiesche seems drawn to those vast, open landscapes that challenge both body and soul. In Sahara Unveiled, he traversed the length of that inhospitable desert from Algiers to Timbuktu, along the way limning an intimate portrait of the environment and the people who inhabit it. In Inside the Sky Langewiesche meditates on a different wilderness as he explores the ramifications of flight. "Mechanical wings allow us to fly," he writes, "but it is with our minds that we make the sky ours."

And it is chiefly flight's workings on our perceptions and our imagination that interests Langewiesche. "Flying at its best is a way of thinking.... 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. It lets us see that our struggles form patterns on the land, that these patterns repeat to an extent which before we had not known, and that there is a sense to them." Flying has, in fact, changed humankind's perception of itself. Discussing the borderlands along the Rio Grande, Langewiesche points out that from the air it is impossible to disregard the great differences in wealth and environment between Mexico and the United States:

"The narrowness of the view is a problem particular to the ground. Few tourists ever went to Presidio, but those who did often got the astonishing impression that the border there hardly existed. Residents, too, because they freely forded the river, could share that illusion. But from the air the view always widens.... What the ordinary aerial view really shows is exactly the opposite of a unified world."

Langewiesche writes eloquently and at length about flight's influence on politics, environmentalism, culture, and human psychology, punctuating these musings with fascinating accounts of real people--everyone from Otto Lilienthal, a 19th-century German engineer who died while testing a hang glider, to Walton Little, a computer engineer and private pilot who happened to be an eyewitness to the 1996 Valujet air disaster. Bad weather, crowded airports, plane crashes, and the physics of flying all form part of the tapestry as Langewiesche weaves history, science, philosophy, and his own experiences as a pilot into this tough, tender paean to the miracle of flight. --Alix Wilber

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400)

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