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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Aloft
William Langewiesche is an author and journalist. He is currently Vanity Fair’s international correspondent, having made his name writing for Atlantic Monthly. His strong, evocative prose is used to devastating effect on a wide range of subjects. Before embarking on a writing career he worked as a pilot for fifteen years from the age of eighteen. He has been termed one of the leading writers of The New New Journalism, a group of writers who have secured a place at the centre of contemporary American literature, as Tom Wolfe and The New Journalism did in the sixties. His most recent publication is Fly by Wire: The Remarkable Story of the Hudson River Plane Crash, also published by Penguin.
John Banville’s novels include The Book of Evidence, The Sea, and The Infinities.
WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE
Aloft
With an Introduction by John Banville
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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‘The View from Above’, ‘The Turn’, ‘On a Bombay Night’, ‘Inside an Angry Sky’, ‘Slam and Jam’ and ‘Valujet 592’ first published as Inside the Sky by Vintage Departures 1998
‘The Crash of EgyptAir 990’ and ‘Columbia’s Last Flight’ first published in Atlantic Monthly in 2001 and 2003 respectively
‘The Devil at 37,000 Feet’ first published in Vanity Fair 2009
This collection under this title published in Penguin Classics 2010
Copyright © William Langewiesche, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2009
Introduction copyright © John Banville, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and the author of the Introduction has been asserted
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Warren Faidley: Excerpt from ‘In Harm’s Way’ by Warren Faidley (Weatherwise, Washington, D. C., December 1992). Reprinted by permission of Warren Faidley.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-104581-8
In memory of Che Barnes, who disappeared over the Pacific, October 29, 2009
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
I The View from Above
2 The Turn
3 On a Bombay Night (The Turn continued)
4 Inside an Angry Sky
5 Slam and Jam
6 Valujet 592
7 The Crash of EgyptAir 990
8 Columbia’s Last Flight
9 The Devil at 37,000 Feet
Author’s Note
With the exception of the ‘The View From Above’, the articles collected here were written for the Atlantic Monthly during its golden era from about 1995 to 2005, and more recently for Vanity Fair, which exists today as one of the few mainstream publications in the English language that allows for long-form narrative reporting. A few editors stand in the background – most notably the brilliant Cullen Murphy, a writer himself, who for thirty years has been expanding other writers’ ambitions to match his own. I myself never intended to write about aviation, having left professional flying behind for life as an international correspondent. Indeed the aviation writing collected here constitutes only a fraction of the work I have done on a variety of topics largely related to conflict and change, from parts of the world both far away and near. Gangs in Brazil, wars in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Islamist radicalism in North Africa and London, ship-breaking in India, an environmentalist missionary in Patagonia – these are the sorts of subjects that have occupied my time. It is almost to my surprise therefore to find at this mid-point in my career that I have written enough on aviation, already, to make a book and call it Aloft.
The essays appear roughly in the order they were published. The first that I wrote, however, appears as the sixth in the collection: ‘Valujet 592.’ It is about the 1996 crash in the Florida Everglades of an airliner that burned in flight, and more fundamentally about the inherent inability of governments or the airlines themselves to keep such accidents from happening. Murphy and Atlantic editor-in-chief William Whitworth sent me to the crash site for the first week after the accident, and then encouraged me to wait a full year before returning to the story. That sort of approach has been typical for me. The Valujet piece was noticed in safety engineering circles. After its publication I was asked once a year for several years to address system specialists at Los Alamos, the US weapons laboratory where the atomic bomb was born. For the safety of the world, each year I politely declined.
I am not a reporter in the traditional sense, because I do not report the news. While others slave against the clock to meet daily or weekly deadlines, what motivates me is the prospect of having to complete a project at some distant date on the calendar. The only truly journalistic piece here is the one on air traffic control – called ‘Slam and Jam’ – where one of the points is that safety does not hang in the balance, and controllers do not have especially stressful jobs. It so happened that another writer did a piece on air traffic control for the New York Times Magazine at the same time, and drew the opposite picture. His work was picked up by Hollywood, and made into a bad movie called Pushing Tin. My piece elicited only a prank phone call from a British friend, who pretended to be a controller and threatened to burn down my house. Obviously there was something wrong with my take. No article of mine has ever been made into a movie.
I never wanted to write about flight. It is a genre too easily confused with false heroics, or, worse, with tedious transportation history of the British plane-spotter kind. So each time I had to be pushed. The pusher has always been Cullen Murphy, a man with no inherent interest in aviation, but with an insatiable curiosity about the world, and also, simply, with a love for non-fiction writing. The episode that stands out in my memory occurred on a wintry day in Boston, at the Atlantic’s venerable offices, in the years before the magazine moved to Washington. Murphy was dressed as usual in a jacket with elbow patches and a bowtie. I was slumped as usual in a chair. Murphy said he wanted me to consider writing another aviation piece, if any came to mind. I said, no, hell no, I was done with writing about airplanes because I had more important things to say – maybe something about the role of romanticism in fomenting war, or the history of the world since Jesus Christ, or, my favorite, the five primary fallacies of our time. Murphy is an imperturbable man. H
e quietly asked me to reconsider, and said he would publish anything on flight that I might choose to write. Anything? I proposed the most esoteric topic I could imagine – an article about turning an airplane – which surely he would reject. To my surprise he answered yes. The result was ‘The Turn’. To my further surprise he published it, and somehow it was a success, however small.
Cullen Murphy, William Whitworth, Mike Kelly, and Graydon Carter. There have been others in the book world as well – in New York, London, Paris, São Paulo, and Milan. These editors represent publishing as a brave and decent trade. But of course there are frustrations, too. For years after I went to work for the Atlantic, I had a little side business of occasionally taking pilots – a few at a time – into the worst weather we could survive in small and intentionally-vulnerable airplanes. This was more technical and less adventurous than it might seem: it was training for the mind, a practical school in self-discipline and escape-route planning. Again, Murphy asked me to write about it. I wrote the piece called ‘Inside An Angry Sky’, and Whitworth decided to publish it. The manuscript found its way, however, into the New York offices of the real estate tycoon who owned the Atlantic at the time, and his lieutenant, an amateur pilot, happed upon it. Then the unthinkable occurred: the lieutenant violated the firewalls around editorial content, and raised a fuss about the article, which he believed exhibited reckless and dangerous behavior. Technically he was wrong, but such were the other pressures on Whitworth that he acquiesced and spiked the piece. Murphy was upset, and Whitworth may have been, too. I thought the episode was funny. Did this man in New York believe that our readers would go out and start flying storms? Furthermore, what constitutes dangerous behavior? I had just returned from an extended stay in Sudan, on an assignment for the Atlantic during which I had dodged Revolutionary Guards and been arrested three times. There was no complaint about that.
I could go on at length about the back stories here, but will not. Suffice it to say that ‘The Crash of EgyptAir 990’ was the Atlantic’s response to 9/11 – a parable about war; ‘Columbia’s Last Flight,’ was written largely in Baghdad; ‘The Devil At 37,000 Feet’ required such hard driving in the Amazon that it largely destroyed a truck; and finally, ‘The View From Above’ in my own mind has always been a tribute to my father, a man who believed in the importance of simply looking around. Beyond that I will not burden these pages. The pieces can be read in any order. They do not require technical knowledge. They avoid jargon, over-simplification, or mis-statement of fact. Most of them are stories about matters somewhat larger than themselves. There are suffused with the wonder I still feel that as a species we now find ourselves in the sky.
William Langewiesche
New York
November 2009
Introduction
The Lonely Impulse
That sky, that band of air between the earth’s skin and the edge of space, is for most of us an alien environment, where clouds boil and roil, where headwinds howl, and where the outside temperature, as our pilot jauntily informs us, is low enough to freeze the blood in our veins. William Langewiesche is the opposite of an aerophobe, but even he acknowledges the uncanniness of that turbulent azure above our heads: ‘We find reflections of ourselves there, but of all inhabited places the sky remains the strangest.’
The number of writers who have tackled the subject of flight is very small, and of that number Langewiesche is the least fanciful, the most vigorous – the most, we might say, down-to-earth. His writing is tough and tangy, and as bracing as the breeze that, in the days before air bridges, used to hit you when you stepped out on to the apron to walk to your waiting plane. He is a true heir of the Wright brothers, those quintessentially American gadgeteers, and while he is happy to grant the rest of the world a licence to fly he is in no doubt as to who really owns the skies; as he warns us, ‘I am an American pilot with an American taste for waste, a nervous hunger for speed and power only half justified by the size of the continent.’
Note that his first claim is that he is a pilot. He recognizes clearly in himself the way in which the flying informs the writing, and the reciprocal nature of the two disciplines that together make up his livelihood and his obsession. This is what gives his work its authoritative note; this man knows what he is talking about. ‘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 a disorderly world.’
Here again he shows himself a member of that American fraternity that includes Huck Finn, Hawkeye Natty Bumppo, even Jay Gatsby – though Langewiesche’s green light is not at the end of a dock but on the tip of a wing – all of them seekers after ‘the patterns in a disorderly world’. He is truly a native son, and for him the sky is one more frontier, reachable enough to be still a human zone, just about – space is another element, with no weather and nothing in it except stars and a few drifting bits of manmade hardware. His voice is inflected with that particular American tone which is a blend of fortitude, individualism and unassuageable loneliness. He is surely a student of Emerson, the Emerson who writes: ‘Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.’ Of which Langewiesche’s version might be this:
The aerial view is something entirely new… It lets us see outselves 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 sense to them.
Here we are back again to the solitary man in the lonely sky, fastened into ‘the cockpit as a monastic cell’, discerning the patterns in a disorderly world.
Langewiesche has known his moments of dread, too, the dread that comes of the sudden realization of being aloft at ‘an unbridgeable distance from the world’. It would be hard to think of a writer more dissimilar from him than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – ‘I rejected his work as inauthentic,’ Langewiesche writes, ‘disdaining its sense of the common good, its maudlin emotionalism, and its overwrought musings on the glories of the mission’ – yet in a telling passage the American pragmatist confesses to a moment of fellow-feeling with the ‘notoriously dreamy’ Frenchman.
It was his first winter of cargo flying, ‘dangerous, low-paid work’, and he was not happy, lifting off in nights of black rain ‘into the storms and the inner landscapes of the mind’. On one of those nights, crossing a clearing in the clouds, he glimpsed far below the lights of a single ranch house and remembered a passage in Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight in which the Frenchman spotted a similar farmhouse ‘that seemed to be sailing backwards from him in a great prairie sea, with its freight of human lives’. Suddenly, his nerve began to fail, as he contemplated something that ‘previously I had believed no real pilot would take the time to do’, namely, the possibility that this time he might not return from the night sky. Return he did, of course, but the sense of doom remained with him, until another night when, flying through the last storm of a bleak winter, the ‘sheer force of that storm forced me at last to look up from the instruments again – and when I did I discovered a place fantastic even to me, far away in the wild winds, where rain fell upward and blizzards blew among cloud mountains and the walls of great caverns erupted in light’. It was a catharctic vision, and, for all its savagery, a saving one:
After returning I stood in the wind-driven rain and watched the workers back their vans up to the airplane to unload its cargo. I did not tell them where I had been. How could they have understood? Even to me it was a wonder that this little metal machine, so battered and unloved, had carried me there. It was late at night, and I should have driven home and slept, but I was not tired. I felt renewed not because I had su
rvived but because I had the means and the inclination to fly again into that angry sky. No pilot could ever be at home there, but I for one had stopped yearning for the ground.
These are wonderful essays, at once thrilling and informative, awe-inspiring and exact, in places frightening, in others reassuring, and always elegant. Langewiesche is a born flyer – his father was a famous pilot who wrote a classic text on flight navigation – and an inspired writer, one whom, like Yeats’s airman,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds
John Banville, 2010
I
The View from Above
After a century of flying, we still live at a moment of emergence like that experienced by creatures first escaping from the sea. For us the emergence has been given meaning because we can think about it, and can perhaps understand the nature of our liberation. Mechanical wings allow us to fly, but it is with our minds that we make the sky ours. The old measures of distance no longer apply, in part because we hop across the globe in single sittings, but also because in doing so we visit a place which even just above our homes is as exotic and revealing as the most foreign destination. This book contains observations of that place, and it takes the form of a spiral climb, occasionally returning overhead of the point where now it begins, with the idea that flight’s gift is to let us look around.
At first I mean a simple form of looking around, and one that requires little instruction – just gazing down at the ordinary scenery sliding by below. The best views are views of familiar things, like cities and farms and bottlenecked freeways. So set aside the beauty of sunsets, the majesty of mountains, the imprint of winds on golden prairies. The world beneath our wings has become a human artifact, our most spontaneous and complex creation. Tourists may not like to contemplate the evidence, with its hints of greed and self-destruction, but the fact remains that the old sterilized landscapes – like designated outlooks and pretty parks and sculpted gardens – have become obsolete, and that it is largely the airplane that has made them so. The aerial view is something entirely new. We need to admit that it flattens the world and mutes it in a rush of air and engines, and that it suppresses beauty. But it also strips the façades from our constructions, and by raising us above the constraints of the treeline and the highway it imposes a brutal honesty on our perceptions. 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.