William Langewiesche, professional pilot, journalist, and author of nine books, died on June 15, 2025. He was 70.
He wrote for many publications, including a stint at FLYING Magazine in the late 1970s.
The name Langewiesche should be familiar to many pilots, as William’s father, Wolfgang, wrote Stick and Rudder, regarded by many to be the bible of how to fly an airplane. First published in 1944 and still in print, it has long been regarded as the source of flying technique and the foibles of airplanes and the sky they navigate.
The book remains relevant eight decades later, despite its sometimes quaint, antiquated language and the enormous leaps in aviation technology.
William Langewiesche was born on June 12, 1955. For the past 35 years, he was known as one of the world’s leading investigative writers. His most recently published, and arguably most important, work appeared in The New York Times Magazine on December 8, 2024. “The Most Dangerous Game” is built on a secret Pentagon exercise from decades ago that showed how nuclear escalation spirals out of control—“a lesson that the world’s nuclear powers may now have forgotten.” Langewiesche researched and wrote the article after being diagnosed in early 2022 with the cancer that eventually took his life.
From his brief stint at FLYING Magazine to his long tenures at The Atlantic (1993-2006) and Vanity Fair (2006-2018), Langewiesche’s work was always shaped by his on-site research and utmost diligence in establishing facts before presenting them in an artfully readable and persuasive form. He made great writing look easy. It was this reputation that earned him the sole carte blanche among journalists to roam “the pile” unescorted after the 9/11 attack on lower Manhattan.
He did this for nine months, conducting the research for articles in The Atlantic and the book American Ground: Unbuilding The World Trade Center, published in 2002. True to form, his diligence would not allow him to accept that his exposure to the pile caused the cancer that would take his life a quarter century later. “Maybe, maybe not. There’s no proof of cause and effect,” he told a friend last month.
Getting the story where it happened or where it led was the hallmark of Langewiesche’s career. In the late 1990s, he accepted the assignment when The Atlantic proposed sending him to the Balkans and Kosovo. There, he made the curious discovery that he was calm and unruffled in a war zone, and in 2004, The Atlantic assigned him to Baghdad, where he opted not to live in the Green Zone.
Instead, he rented a house downtown, bought an old BMW and hired two bodyguards. That was how he lived for a couple of years. At one point he and his cohorts were on the roof of the house with weapons poised as trouble approached.
Langewiesche emerged from the Iraq War unscathed, but he later had a close brush with mortality while covering a conflict in Africa. An aged riverboat was the only transportation to his contact, and the vessel was sharing the river with corpses.
When the captain offered him a cup of tea, Langewiesche knew he must accept his host’s hospitality. The skipper lowered a bucket into the water and poured some into the kettle. The resulting beverage took Langewiesche closer to death than he had ever been.
The enduring themes of Langewiesche’s work are war reporting, the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, aviation safety (the crashes of ValuJet 592, EgyptAir 990, the Space Shuttle Columbia, Air France 447, Malaysia 370, the Boeing 737 Max), and marine shipping (piracy and ship-breaking). His books steered clear of war but expanded on nuclear weapons proliferation and aviation and shipping. His Atlantic piece on EgyptAir 990 earned him the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2002, and “Rules of Engagement” in Vanity Fair won him the same award in 2007. He was a finalist for this and other awards every year between 1999 and 2008.
This passage from ValuJet, The Atlantic, March 1998, is characteristic of his research, judgment, and writing skill:
“After a good night’s sleep, FAA Administrator David Hinson might have tried to repair the damage. Instead, he appeared two days later at a Senate hearing in Washington, sounding like an unrepentant Prussian: “We have a very professional, highly dedicated, organized, and efficient inspector workforce that do their job day in and day out. And when we say an airline is safe to fly, it is safe to fly. There is no gray area.”
His colleagues must have winced. Aviation safety is nothing but a gray area, and the regulation of it is an indirect process of negotiation and maneuver. Consider the size of the airline business, the scale of the sky, and the loneliness of an airplane in flight. The FAA can affect safety by establishing standards and enforcing them through inspections and paperwork, but it cannot throw the switches or turn the wrenches, or in this case supervise the disposal of old oxygen generators. Safety is ultimately in the hands of the operators, the mechanics and pilots, and their managers, because it involves a blizzard of small judgments.
Hinson might have admitted this reality to the American public, which is certainly capable of understanding such subtleties, but instead, inexplicably, he chose to link the FAA’s reputation to that of ValuJet. This placed the agency in an impossible position. Whether for incompetence or for cronyism, the FAA would now inevitably be blamed.
In 1993, William penned an homage to Stick and Rudder with an article for The Atlantic called simply “The Turn,” later expanded into William’s personal favorite among his books: Aloft: Thoughts on the Experience of Flight, published in 2010. As a professional pilot, William was much in demand as a flight instructor, and he delighted in tackling the worst weather with his instrument-flying students. He introduced his young children (Castine, 12, and Archibald, nine, from William’s second marriage, to Tia) to gliding at Wurtsboro, New York, in the summer of 2022. He is survived also by his first wife, Minouche, and their children, Matthew and Anna.
FLYING wishes to thank former staff writer Nigel Moll who graciously contributed this article.
View one of Langewiesche’s many FLYING articles in this 1979 issue:
