William Langewiesche died on Sunday. He was a damn titan. Langewiesche hit his stride in longform magazine journalism round about 1998, applying the concept of system accidents to the downing of ValueJet Airlines Flight 592, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 aircraft that had crashed into the Florida Everglades in 1996. Langewiesche had been doing international affairs essays for The Atlantic—those were also good, and he kept at this work for the rest of his career—but here was a story in his true wheelhouse. It's a great blog: Langewiesche, a professional pilot, had the aviation chops to comprehend the accident like few of his journalistic peers, but what grabs you about the best Langewiesche jams is his talent for stitching together a timeline of events, using as thread the little quiet things that might only be spotted by an expert, or an insider, or an ace researcher. Langewiesche was always at least one of the three, and for aviation stories he was all of the above, to say nothing of an incredible natural storyteller. It will not be possible for any human to surpass his knack for pulling out and organizing the details of NTSB investigations into a gripping, horrifying narrative. Most of his aviation stories, covering a solid 20-year period, felt not just like an event but like a definitive final examination of a piece of history.
Two of my favorite Langewiesche jams are about maritime disasters. His retelling of the 2015 sinking of the container ship SS El Faro is an all-timer, pulling together and precisely ordering NTSB investigatory findings, telemetry data, weather reports, corporate history, industry best practices, maritime disaster protocols, biographical information, and absolutely gutting audio transcripts to provide a complete timeline of a tragic and entirely avoidable disaster. I have read his 2004 story about the sinking of MS Estonia, a car-passenger ferry that foundered in the Baltic Sea in 1994, at least 10 and possibly as many as 40 times. It's a bold, breathtaking piece of nonfiction writing, lean and relentless, befitting utterly the terrifying circumstances of the disaster it examines. I am going to pause the writing of this blog right this very moment so that I can go and read it again.
Survival that night was a very tight race, and savagely simple. People who started early and moved fast had some chance of winning. People who started late or hesitated for any reason had no chance at all. Action paid. Contemplation did not. The mere act of getting dressed was enough to condemn people to death, and although many of those who escaped to the water succumbed to the cold, most of the ultimate winners endured the ordeal completely naked or in their underwear. The survivors all seem to have grasped the nature of this race, the first stage of which involved getting outside to the Deck 7 promenade without delay. There was no God to turn to for mercy. There was no government to provide order. Civilization was ancient history, Europe a faint and faraway place. Inside the ship, as the heel increased, even the most primitive social organization, the human chain, crumbled apart. Love only slowed people down. A pitiless clock was running. The ocean was completely in control.
William Langewiesche, The Atlantic
He wrote books, too. The one of them that I read, The Outlaw Sea, is rich and authoritative, but here I will admit that Langewiesche's fascination with maritime lawlessness had a little less room than my own for, you know, guys with cutlasses and wooden legs, and often I felt somewhat at sea (heh) in dense chapters about customs enforcement and whatnot. With room to stretch out—and this was a man who would get 15,000 words in Vanity Fair to cover events that unfolded over a period of minutes—Langewiesche dumped an intimidating volume of research into each chapter. What blew me away, though, was his command of the material: You can more easily understand the depth of his knowledge when you read, for example, his absolute banger of a magazine story about the infuriating 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, because he was a pilot, and an experienced one, and had pilot takes. But reading The Outlaw Sea, you would totally believe that he had also been a longtime sea captain, or, I don't know, possibly even a privateer.
Langewiesche benefitted, as a reporter, from the connections he'd made at airlines, at the Federal Aviation Administration, at the National Transportation Safety Board, and at the huge multinational aerospace companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's commercial aircraft. Friendships and loyalties in those corridors also fucked him up pretty good: In 2019, Langewiesche published a long and awful story for the New York Times about the mechanical failures that were linked to two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 Max airliners. The planes had a new technology called MCAS, or Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which was intended to offset a change in flight performance caused by the use of new, heavier turbofan engines. MCAS took inputs from angle-of-attack sensors and, if triggered, would point the airplane's nose toward the ground, correcting automatically for an aerodynamic stall. Crucially, MCAS could be triggered erroneously by false data from a single malfunctioning sensor, causing a plane in normal flight to suddenly point itself at the ground, without pilot input. Even more crucially, investigators later determined that Boeing failed to adequately inform operators of the existence of the system, leading to circumstances where pilots would suddenly and inexplicably find themselves attempting to control aircraft that were trying to crash themselves into the earth. Even after Boeing revealed the existence of MCAS, pilots remained unaware that a single faulty sensor could cause the system to take emergency action in otherwise normal flight, correcting for a phantom aerodynamic stall entirely at random.
Langewiesche, expressing a deeply regrettable faith in the best intentions of aerospace executives, argued in his NYT story that the actual cause of the two fatal accidents was not malfunctioning airplanes that were pointing themselves over and over again directly at the ground, but was instead a lack of "airmanship" among low-paid flight crews at Asian and African airlines, who lacked the skill and situational awareness to manage a phenomenon known as runaway trim. There was a fine and sensible point somewhere in there, about the way that automation, deregulation, and competition have changed the commercial pilot profession, but there was also this astonishing section, which continues to look worse and worse as the depths of Boeing's corporate depravity have been ever more glaringly exposed:
The rush to lay blame was based in part on a poor understanding not just of the technicalities but also of Boeing’s commercial aviation culture. The Max’s creation took place in suburban Seattle among engineers and pilots of unquestionable if bland integrity, including supervising officials from the Federal Aviation Administration. Although Boeing’s designers were aware of timetables and competitive pressures, the mistakes they made were honest ones, or stupid ones, or maybe careless ones, but not a result of an intentional sacrifice of safety for gain.
Wherever the Max was created, it has become inarguable in the years since the two fatal crashes that Boeing's commercial aviation culture sucks mondo ass, and that bland integrity at the engineer level is nothing against the enshittifying force of profit-incentive at the executive level.
It was a shitty blog, and Langewiesche deserved to have his ass kicked over it, but his story is overwhelmingly one of a guy who did terrific and important journalism. He published good and essential work about wars, the environment, September 11, and other assorted complicated geopolitical matters, and he was the best disaster reporter in the history of the English language. More than once I have lost an entire day of work just re-reading my favorite Langewiesche joints. Frankly, that is probably how I will blow the rest of today. I am going to recommend a few of his stories now, so that you too can be super productive on this fine summer Wednesday:
"The Lessons of ValueJet 592" introduces readers to the work of Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, who in the 1980s developed the concept of system accidents, describing the way that small independent failures interact and compound in unexpected ways in complex systems, and defy conventional solutions. Langewiesche makes the case—persuasively, in a way that you will regret having encountered anytime you are expected to board an airplane—that modern air travel is so organizationally and technically complicated that it "requires people, in flight or on the ground, to compromise, to make choices, and sometimes even to gamble" in order for the industry to function to the basic satisfaction of executives and travelers. A banger.
"The Crash of EgyptAir 990" is a haunting and bewildering examination of a Boeing 767 flight that, in 1999, appeared to have been piloted intentionally into the Atlantic Ocean.
"Storm Island" is the story of Ouessant, a French island in the English Channel where the weather is extraordinarily fierce. This is unlike your classic Langewiesche jam, but then this is a man who did blogs about big-wave surfing, Olympics infrastructure, black-market human trafficking, and government whistleblowing. He had moves, is what I'm saying. A delightful and supremely bitchin' travel blog.
"Columbia's Last Flight" is a comprehensive and righteously angry unpacking of the catastrophic mid-flight breakup of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated over Texas in 2003. Incredibly long and thorough, but with that propulsive Seconds From Disaster style that was Langewiesche's signature.
"A Sea Story" is, the more that I think about it, my favorite of them all. The sinking of the MS Estonia is not at all a nice thing to read about, but Langewiesche's storytelling powers are at their peak. Now I'm going to read it again, for the second time today.
I have the feeling that "The Human Factor," about Air France Flight 447, is the Langewiesche jam that was most widely read, at least until the publication of his 2019 story about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (see below). I read this the day it was published, and was floored by it, and then read it four or five times over the next few weeks.
"The Devil at 37,000 Feet," about a mid-air collision between two aircraft over the Brazilian jungle, is possibly the most troubling of his aviation stories, because of the grisly details of the accident clean-up but even more because of the incredible improbability of the accident itself.
"The Clock Is Ticking" is the story of SS El Faro. You've got to read it, man.
"What Really Happened To Malaysia's Missing Airplane" is, to me, the last of the great Langewiesche aviation blogs. Published in 2019, it tries its damnedest to solve the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished over the Indian Ocean in 2014. There's a really staggering amount of reporting in this story, from several continents, and encompassing overlapping formal investigations from multiple governments on down to the self-funded efforts of nomadic beachcombing hobbyists.
You cannot rise to prominence as a language's foremost chronicler of disasters without, you know, there being disasters, and so I do feel weird admitting that I greeted each new William Langewiesche byline the way Luis Paez-Pumar greets video game trailers. On the other hand, disasters are an immutable fact of human existence, civilization after all being a construct of unfathomable complexity. Tragic things are going to happen. Figuring out how and why is the complicated work of serious professionals; I suppose storytelling is how they share the lessons.
This story was corrected to fix the title and hyperlink to the Air France story.
