An author I respect.

I love William Langewiesche's work.

His book Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight, inspired and educated me while I was working on various flight ratings, and I still learn from it when I re-read it.  His articles have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for many years, and I very strongly recommend his AM articles on flight (many of which appear in this book) to anyone interested in aviation, laypersons and pilots alike.  Additionally, his reporting on the war in Iraq has been excellent and beautifully composed, and he's a wonderful general subject and foreign policy writer, as well.  The Atlantic Monthly publishes their most recent archives online for free- please take a look when you've got the time.  One of the best articles I've ever read on flight, The Turn, is a paid-subscription-only article on the web site, but is printed in full in the book you see here.  Same with The Lessons of ValuJet 592, possibly the best summary of an aviation disaster I've ever read- he does admirable justice to the complexity of the circumstances leading to an airline crash, and recognizes the errors inherent to human works.

Langewiesche's book American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, is well worth reading also- he was the only reporter given unrestricted access to the Ground Zero site in the months proceeding the attacks of September 11th.  He tells the stories of several of the people involved in the human and engineering nightmare that was the aftermath of that day, and as with many of his works, he somehow reflects more intense human feeling researching the technical details of the event than most reporters can capture interviewing victims and the widows of victims on camera.  I guess for me, the factual explanation of how something comes about allows me to empathize more readily than I can when faced with a purely emotional story- I can feel the feeling and not feel manipulated into having it, I guess.

For his entire Atlantic Monthly collection, click here.

Specific articles I've enjoyed that are available online for no charge:

Aviation

Columbia's Last Flight
The Crash of EgyptAir 990 (first paragraph only, sorry)

Iraq

Welcome to the Green Zone

Foreign Affairs

The Wrath of Khan

Other

The Profits of Doom