William is apparently the son of Wolfgang, who wrote Stick and Rudder, and is a staff writer for Atlantic Monthly.
In the first section, “The View from Above,” L. declares his belief “that flight’s greatest gift is to let us look around,” and he illustrates by describing the view from various kinds of airplanes—paragliders powered and unpowered, jets, and small airplanes flown just high enough (he also described flying an air-taxi too low, in self-defense). “The best views are views of familiar things.” Disparaging his own proposal that every high school offer paragliding courses, L. says “we have taught ourselves . . . to worship safety.”
The second essay, “The Stranger’s Path,” is L.’s homage to John Brinckerhoff Jackson, founder of Landscape (1951-1968), whom L. never met. Jackson, though, espoused what he called “vernacular” landscape, which seems to agree with some L.’s ideas about familiar things making the best views, or that unspoiled landscape isn’t as interesting as that upon which people have made a mark. Also, L. thinks Jackson, though not an aviator himself, espoused an “aerial view” that is mainly “a frank and distant way of seeing one’s surroundings even when on the ground.” Jackson was a patrician who tried most of his life to become a common man. His A Sense of Place, A sense of Time (1995) won the PEN best essays award.
In “The Turn,” L. gives a short history of flight and points out that it does not become practical until the Wright brothers figure out how to turn an airship. The turn is strange, because a normal one is not experienced as such by those flying: gravity operates toward the floor of the airplane, and it is the scene outside the window that seems to move. When there is no ground reference, pilots’ instincts and perceptions will not keep them out of deadly spirals, and L. recounts the history of the pilots and engineers who developed gyroscope instruments to tell the plane’s real attitude to the pilot. But even experienced pilots can be confused and decide the instruments are wrong, as L. shows in “On a Bombay Night,” about the crash of a 747 in 1978.
In his early days, L. was a cargo pilot based in San Francisco, often flying through bad weather with faulty equipment. “Inside an Angry Sky” describes bad weather flying he does deliberately much later, and its narrative is interspersed with discussions of weather and weathermen. L. argues that the weatherman’s large view is necessarily different from the pilot’s, but that both are trying to understand: “We fly the forecast, turn, and probe the forecast’s flaws. But we are not theoreticians. The airplane’s forward motion imposes a crude immediacy on our thoughts, so that even when we do not understand the weather, we may pretend that we do. Flying as much as writing teaches the need for such fictions, for discerning the patterns in disorderly world.”
That last sentence is revealing because it suggest that when L. the writer looks for patterns in his experience, he sees them as a flyer. Thus when he talks about weather, about air traffic controllers as in the next chapter, or about airline accidents, he does so from the perspective of the pilot.
“Slam and Jam” uses Newark’s airport—busier than JFK or La Guardia—to talk about air traffic control and its problems. But, “despite what the public has been led to believe,” controllers don’t “guide” airplanes, and if they all stopped what they were doing, the planes in the air would find their way safely to the ground. Controllers are there to keep the traffic moving as fast as possible, but there is growing friction between them and their superiors, who are FAA managers who listen too much to what the airlines want and have lost touch with the actual job. Moreover, air traffic keeps increasing while the number of runways to handle it stays pretty much the same.
In the last chapter, “Valuejet 592,” L. considers the possibility of what Charles Perrow calls “normal accidents” or “system accidents”: in very complex systems serious failures are bound to happen, and if they are compounded, accidents are inevitable when the system speed is high: space travel, chemical or nuclear plants, air travel. Perrow’s book was Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (1984). L. doesn’t think much of Perrow but he believes the theory, which he read of in Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (1993). L. doesn’t think re-regulation is the answer because it would make air travel more expensive and more restricted, but also because solutions—new regulations—add to the complexity of the system and thus make accidents more likely. ( )

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. ( )