On a short runway in northern California, William Langewiesche is in the pilot's seat of his Husky A-1B bush plane. He's saying, "It's 38 degrees on oil. I won't take off with less than 100 degrees." We wait.

"L-M-N-O-P"—"They're putting in navigation points"—"Oscar 5"

"You hear that guy? Radios here are really busy. You hear a lot of chatter, which is really annoying."

We're still waiting for 100 degrees on oil. He's saying, "I just put on a new propeller. It's the best propeller out there, better climb performance, better drag performance. It's the sexiest thing around if you're into propellers. I was just in Russia doing all this stuff on nuclear proliferation and all I could think about was my new propeller."

From the sky over Northern California, flying at 2,000 feet with William Langewiesche, you see farmland in quadrants, the alluvial plain of the Sacramento Valley, coastal mountains and low clouds to the east. Then he flies low where the Husky is happiest. You see treetops, "red-neck trailers" on isolated hilltops, and cows. He says, "Okay, you're going to feel some disorientation now." At 1,901 you see only the red-lighted numbers 1-9-0-1 on the instrument panel because you're feeling g-load—negative 2 gs—and focusing on the instrument panel keeps you from throwing up. Soon he's saying, "When you're upside down it's all positive gs. You don't feel upside down. You're upside down now."

During Langewiesche's fifteen years at The Atlantic Monthly he wrote about disasters such as the crash of ValuJet 592 in the Florida everglades; the spiraling dive of EgyptAir 990 into the waters off Nantucket; the unbuilding of the World Trade Center Towers; the disintegration of the Columbia space shuttle. How? The organizing principle of the sky. His spatial orientation enables him to render otherwise untellable stories of crash sites, war zones, diving cockpits, and devastated people with dispassion and understatement that is fleet and spare, almost poetic.

His best pieces, he says, are stories that are metaphors conveying "the power of a tangible narrative that has a deeper meaning." His Atlantic cover story "The Crash of EgyptAir 990," which appeared in the aftermath of 9/11 (November 2001), was a metaphor for war. It was also The Atlantic's intentional response to the attacks of September 11. His piece titled "Eden: A Gated Community" (June 1999), about entrepreneur-turned-ecologist Robert Tompkins (champion of saving Chile's rain forest by buying up land and imposing his conservation experiment on the indigenous citizens), Langewiesche describes as "a classic missionary story." His piece "The Shipbreakers" (August 2000), about dismantling ship carcasses in Alang, India, wasametaphor for "imperialism dolled up as a left-wing cause." I asked what the ValuJet crash story represented. He said, "A paradox about how the pursuit of safety for safety's sake will kill you. 'Thou shalt not turn to government for all solutions and regulations.'"

He grew up "in the cockpit" in Princeton, New Jersey, son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, a celebrated pilot and an essayist in his own right. The father wrote the definitive primer for pilots, Stick and Rudder, which the son has never read. (You can buy online a "Wolfgang Langewiesche Is My Hero" bumper sticker.) Langewiesche's mother belonged to the "Nantucket Coleman family," which means on his mother's side he is remotely related to Benjamin Franklin. Langewiesche's first solo flight was in a glider at age fourteen.

He smokes Cuban cigars, a habit he picked up in Iraq, to the dismay of his beguiling 13-year-old daughter Anna. He possesses a dry wit—we laughed a lot—though it can sometimes be hidden by his otherwise taciturn bearing. He says he is not a religious man.

He won the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting for "The Crash of EgyptAir 990." Two years later "Columbia's Last Flight" took the same prize.

Five of his books have been published (they all include maps) and a new one—The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor—is forthcoming this spring from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. American Ground appeared as three sequential stories in TheAtlantic, and "transform[ed] the reputation of the magazine," notes publisher David Bradley. It also elicited visceral hostility from the New York firefighters and their supporters because of Langewiesche's reportage of firefighters'looting and clannishness on the pile. In May 2006, Langewiesche exchanged his slot on The Atlantic masthead as national correspondent for a spoton Vanity Fair's.

I flew with Langewiesche in his bush plane, lingered with him at the hangar, and sat with him in his home office in California where we probed the unsettled places of human experience in his work. But first, I had to ask:

Should we honestly believe that if we're in a plane going down that our seat cushions can be used as flotation devices?

There are plenty of cases of airplanes going into the water and people surviving. What to do in that case is not difficult to remember. Get the hell of out the plane and don't wear your high heels down the inflatable exit ramp.

You wrote in your book Inside the Sky that flying, like writing, "teaches the need for discerning patterns in a disorderly world." Is this how you approach journalism?

It's all about looking at the ground. All the patterns of life on earth are very exposed to the view from above. When you're in an airplane and you're looking down on the ground from above, it's very difficult for anybody to bullshit you. People build their front porches or plantations trying to impress the neighbors. Nobody is trying to impress pilots flying by. There is very little pretentiousness directed toward the sky. So you see things which are grand and glorious and wonderful, and things that are despicable. And you see them in their real relationship to one another.

Are you a pilot who writes or a writer who flies?

I'm a writer. Even when I was a pilot I was a writer. I read an enormous amount of material on what I'm working on but I never take notes on what I read. I don't even underline anymore. I just read and allow myself to forget what is naturally forgotten and remember what I remember. I feel no obligation to cite anything. I like my prose unburdened with apparatus. I take relatively few notes. I listen carefully. I like to use a recorder because it adds the ability to revisit things in a way taking notes doesn't. It's not a crutch, though it's a pain in the ass. I also prefer to do my own research. It makes my work less encyclopedic.

The truth is, you don't have to be smart to be a pilot. The best pilots are people who are dutiful, functional, golfers—hobbyists. They repair antique cars in their garages.

In the same book you talk about "suspended disbelief." What do you mean?

I said in my book that pilots must learn against all contradictory sensations the discipline of absolute belief in their instruments. Our greatest weakness is that we still lack an instinctive sense of bank. It can induce deadly spirals. Instinct is worse than the useless in the clouds. The first challenge is to suspend disbelief and trust your instruments over instinct.

In the chapter I wrote about the crash of Air India 885, a flight to Bombay in 1978, the pilots were disagreeing about which instrument was failing. I read the transcript of the black box. They had no horizon. It was a black night. Only one instrument was failing. They weren't all failing. There were other instruments that indicated which was right. The two main pilots were locked on their primary instruments, like tunnel vision, and a third pilot sitting behind them was looking at the instrument that was correct. He was saying, "No, that one!" The other guys should have seen it.

Is that the aptitude you brought to your work on the unbuilding of the World Trade Center?

My job was to write about the deconstruction project. I wasn't writing the encyclopedia of the site. I wasn't writing about grief counseling. It was not my mandate to explore the symbolic importance of this event. It was to write about a bunch of junk in the middle of Manhattan and what are they going to do with it. And, by the way, it's a bunch of junk that is loaded with dead bodies and also loaded with political significance. What are you going to do? How are you going to organize that effort? How are you going to see it through? I called it the "unbuilding of the World Trade Center," and I meant that specifically. I didn't say "memorializing" it.

Why did people assert the book was unpatriotic?

The political climate surrounding that topic was one of hysteria and emotionalism. This was especially true of the firemen. Firemen have a culture of their own. These guys live together in the clubhouse a few days a week. They weren't in a position either individually or as a group to resist the trauma and its associated hype.

The criticism was that I was being unpatriotic because I wasn't joining lockstep into hero worship. I was so overwhelmed by the material I was dealing with that I was not aware of the larger political context of the United States in the post-9/11 period. I fault myself for not placing the story in that larger context. I should have acknowledged in just a few sentences that yes, this wonderful thing was happening, that it was uniquely American, brave, and healthy—with the exception of the overblown hero worship.

There were individual heroic acts. But largely we don't know what they were because most of the people who did them died. This categorization of one group of people as being heroes was patently silly and bore no relationship to the experience of war. The firemen were looting. But everyone was looting. I don't care if the New York firemen loot. Let them loot. Looting is part of war. And this was a war. There was a freeing of social morals inside the wtc operation which was very productive and ingenious. It is also why for 99.9 percent of the people there it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. They were desperate not to leave. I wouldn't have written about the firemen at all except that because of their clan-ism they had become a corrosive factor on the pile and had a strong effect on the dynamics of the operation.

Does anything stand out in your memory from the pile that you didn't write about?

I dealt with a lot of grieving widows. The city officials asked me to walk them around the pile, talk to these women, and explain what was going on with the excavation and explain to them how the bodies were being dealt with. I knew the site, and people trusted me to handle these grieving women correctly. I walked with them and they cried. It was terribly hard. It was sad. I wanted to put my arm around these women and say, "Please, I know this is sad. Go ahead and cry." I didn't. But I stayed beside them, sometimes for an hour or so. What was odd, and I still don't understand why, is that it was almost entirely women. You'd very rarely see a man come in there that way. I never wrote about that stuff because it wasn't my mandate.

Did this assignment traumatize you?

People tell me I am traumatized. Maybe. I don't know. It's not obvious to me. Over the years, though, a kind of fatigue sets in, a kind of I-don't-give-a-damnism. There is probably some effect like that, a kind of emotional recklessness, a grimness. But it's not severe. I don't know the answer. I do my job. And I know what I do is less dangerous than what a lot of other people do.

Did you do anything to help yourself?

Yeah, I had a beer. I didn't feel I needed help. I still refuse that. I had a conflict on camera with Charlie Rose about it. I don't feel anything. It's just the way it is. People react in different ways. It wasn't negative. I'm not denying the tragedy. But those people were dead. Nobody died at the site. It was risky. But risk is good. Danger is nice. Danger is liberation. War is liberation. That's why people like to fight wars.

You said the EgyptAir 990 piece was a metaphor for war and The Atlantic's response to the 9/11 attacks? In what way?

The buildings were hit. Mike Kelly, who was then the editor, Cullen [Murphy] and I were on the phone together for over an hour, and we decided we had in this story the right metaphor for war. It was about what happens when communication breaks down and you end up walking away. That piece was about the inability of American technocrats to handle the Egyptian government after the plane went down. As a reporter, you reach a point when, in trying to resolve this conflict, people are looking at you and they are lying to you and you know they are lying to you and they know you know they are lying to you. Communication breaks down. You walk away from the table. This leads to war.

[Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq on April 3, 2003.]

You insert a chapter in Inside the Sky called "The Stranger's Path" examining the odd life of J.B. Jackson, who was not a pilot. Why did you give an entire chapter in a book about flight to someone who did not fly?

It was a literary exercise, an experiment. You can argue whether or not it was successful. For the most part I think it was not successful. Jackson saw things as if he were flying low. I call it the vernacular landscape. Jackson's vernacular landscape was actually a song of praise for a level of chaos in a society. He was right to distrust romanticism. He was a believer in the healthiness that comes from chaos, the inherent turbulence and mess. I believe that stuff.

J.B. Jackson seemed a lonely man. Did this attract you to him?

He was lonely. But that's okay. He liked junkyards. He liked trash. He was the bullshit patrol. He was attractive to me because of that. From an aesthetic point of view he was a brilliant essayist. He was unattractive in other ways. He had too much money. Also of interest is that his essays in the end left something undone, uncompleted. He never quite delivers in his essays. It was like his life in a way. In the end, he didn't quite get there.

Do you "get there" in your pieces?

The writing process for me is deeply consuming. I spend a huge amount of time paying attention to sound, rhythm, imagery, tension, and form as opposed strictly to content. At the risk of all else, it is a shift in the mind, maybe something like a meditative state, only it can go on for weeks and weeks. I can't get up in the morning, write for a few hours, and then go play tennis. I get up in the morning and wake up two months later.

I also see it as highly tactile, like sculpting, forming something, smoothing it with hand strokes. Where before there was nothing, in the end there is a sculpture, an object. Occasionally it doesn't happen that way, either because of my own inability or because I don't have the right subject matter. You can get stuck with an overly linear, overly complex, overly generalized text—all kinds of overlys—that can screw up the aesthetic of a piece. At the same time, I hate aesthetics for aesthetics sake. That is a form of masturbation. Rule number one in writing is Don't Insult the Reader. It's a great insult to a reader to waste reading time. You have this very precious relationship with each reader, and that reader is probably smarter than I am.

What are your goals as a writer?

One of the great errors of our time is to think the world is getting smaller. My goal as a writer is to take my reader into an expanding world. I don't want to write the complete story of anything. I want to write a significant story of something.

What demons drive you?

The wolves are at the door all the time lurking as the risk of failure. I don't think my writing is as good as it should be. I want to be a lot better.

Where do you find peace?

I fly by myself a lot. Sometimes I fly with friends. Last night I went flying with a friend. We cruised around the hills and talked. We flew for about 35 minutes for relaxation, enjoying the view.

Wendy Murray is a writer currently living in Italy, where she is working on a book on Francis of Assisi for Basic Books.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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