William Langewiesche, whose extraordinary body of white-knuckle narrative reporting from all parts of the globe appeared in these pages over a period of decades, died earlier this week at the age of 70. He had been living with a debilitating cancer for several years but continued to plan new projects and to write. His straightforward optimism and ambition, in the face of long odds, are what brought him to The Atlantic in the first place. In the spring of 1991, he sent to our offices a two-part, 20,000-word account of his experiences in the Sahara—a blend of natural history, travelogue, black humor, and adventure story, rendered in deceptively simple prose that possessed an irresistible force. The envelope from Langewiesche arrived out of the blue, along with a cover letter reading “Enclosed are two pieces on Algeria.” Within a few months, that submission, virtually unchanged, became an Atlantic cover story, “The World in Its Extreme.”
Over the next 15 years, Langewiesche contributed a score of major articles to The Atlantic: On Pakistan’s development of atomic weapons. On tensions along the U.S.-Mexico border. On a catastrophic ferry sinking in the Baltic. On the anything-goes legal regime governing ships on the high seas. One particular specialty was flying. His father, Wolfgang, had been a legendary pilot—he was the author of the classic book Stick and Rudder—and Langewiesche flew small planes professionally (air taxis, air ambulances, cargo planes) while in college at Stanford and afterward, supporting himself while he began writing for aviation magazines. For many years, he supplemented his income by teaching pilots how to fly in the worst possible weather, taking off with one of his students only when the radar had lit up with danger.
One of Langewiesche’s gifts was the ability to translate technical minutiae into a gripping yarn. He could recount the arcane details of how an airplane makes a turn in a way that evoked the raptures of dance. His description of the job of air traffic controller may have encouraged many readers to start taking the train. Langewiesche investigated aviation disasters of every kind, whether the nosedive of Valujet 592 or the incineration of the space shuttle Columbia. He won a National Magazine Award for one of his aviation investigations—into the crash of EgyptAir 990—during an extraordinary run that saw him named as a finalist for the award virtually every year for a decade. He would win another National Magazine Award for his reconstruction of a massacre at the hands of American forces in Haditha, Iraq.
Langewiesche’s access to the world of expertise—engineers, historians, nuclear scientists, forensic investigators, other pilots—ran deep, but he was no armchair analyst or globe-spinning litterateur. After 9/11, he spent six months among the workers at Ground Zero to report on the grim, complex task of finding remains and removing debris, on most days venturing deep into the smoldering pile. (His three sequential Atlantic cover stories on the subject in 2002 became the book American Ground.) Langewiesche made many trips to Iraq for the magazine, covering all aspects of the war and producing a cover story about the surreal, hothouse American world inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone. For his much later cover story about the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370—the magazine’s most-read article in 2019—he traveled along the rim of the Indian Ocean, stopping wherever he heard that fragments of wreckage had washed ashore. Fluent in French, he embedded with the French Foreign Legion on a mission to Guyana. A single day on such an assignment would exhaust most people. He was with them for a month.
Langewiesche had no taste for manufactured drama. Real drama, he believed, could be found almost anywhere, in any story, if you looked deeply and patiently enough. Similarly, there was nothing overwrought about his prose. His sentences relied on ordinary words, but for all that possessed a pure and crystalline character that turned reading into compulsion. He rarely injected the first person into what he wrote, but the reader was treated to a seemingly omniscient perspective from right behind his eyes. And that perspective was earned. To ask Langewiesche how he knew a particular fact or how he knew what someone thought—the kind of thing fact-checkers and editors ask all the time—was to embark on an explanatory excursion that underscored how hard he worked for every morsel of insight.
A certain cast of mind characterizes Langewiesche’s work for The Atlantic as well as for Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. He was skeptical about most political and social institutions, not because they weren’t needed but because they were fragile and self-serving. But he was not skeptical about knowledge and expertise, nor about the capacity of ordinary people to transcend circumstances and institutions with humanity and ingenuity. Those people peer out from between the lines of everything he wrote.
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