I love flying, but I don't really love reading super lyrical, poetic books about flying. (I don't like reading lyrical, poetic books about anything.) After the first two chapters I was worried I wouldn't like this book. Thankfully, it really picked up around the third chapter.

I particularly enjoyed the way this book managed to discuss instrument flying, weather, the airspace system, and other nuances of flying without being overly technical or dumbing the topics down. While I think the non-pilot reader might enjoy the prose, the aviators will enjoy the flying details. ( )

William Langewiesche's life has been deeply intertwined with the idea and act of flying. Fifty years ago his father, a test pilot, wrote Stick and Rudder. Inside The Sky is a collection of seven engaging essays on the phenomenon of human flight, from Otto Lilienthal's early experiences to the interesting and dramatic but rather unimportant effects of turbulence, to the high-tension boredom of air-traffic control. In each chapter, Langewiesche easily maintains his aura of reverence and awe at the mere fact of flight; although most people will have flown at least once in their lives, and many will have ceased to be amazed long ago, Langewiesche's zeal at merely seeing so far from so high might just shame them. Of course, Inside The Sky serves as an incisive commentary on the human experience of and attitude toward flight. What sets the book above a mere exploration of a mechanical phenomenon is the simple human joy it expresses; it's at once a celebration of human flight and a condemnation of jaded humanity.
William Langewiesche, a former national correspondent for The Atlantic and a professional pilot, has written about subjects including aviation, national security, and North Africa. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/william-langewiesche/

Langewiesche, one of my favorite technology writers, and author of the fascinating dissection of the ValueJet crash in Atlantic several months ago, is in love with flying. Inside the Sky is his attempt to convey that passion to non-pilots. He disdains commercial flight, which has reduced the experience of flying to being squeezed into tiny little seats, eliminates any sensation of flying, and suppresses the beauty of being able to see the world from a different vantage.

He's a little crazy, too. He and friends make a fetish of flying into storms, testing their ability to read the weather, avoid ice conditions, and to push the envelope, trying to gain an accumulation of experience. He has critics, of course. "I have always understood their concern. But the pursuit of such weather is an internal act, not a public one, and it is neither as reckless nor as arbitrary as it first may seem. It involves dangers, of course, but to a degree unimaginable to the critics, those dangers are controllable" His chapter recounting one such flight is fascinating, but a trip I prefer to make via page turning, never having been a fan of airsickness.

He writes about the business of air traffic controllers, noting that their job is not so much to prevent collisions - although that's the mystique that has grown up around them - but to get the most efficient use of airspace, which means actually getting planes as close together as possible. Since deregulation and the more prevalent use of hubs, airports have become extremely crowded. Helping the airlines to stay on time is a primary responsibility of the controllers. His comments on the antagonism between controllers and the FAA should be read by everyone. It may exp lain why your next plane is late.

Langewiesche analyzes several accidents to reveal certain basic lessons about flying. The crash of an Air India 747 several years ago resulted from the pilot's misreading of an instrument. Despite other instruments that gave him correct information, he flew the plane into the ground. The pilot relied too much on the instrument, failing to remember that "the cockpit's automated warnings, horns, and flashing lights provide largely just the appearance of safety and that for a variety of practical reasons no amount of automation can yet relieve pilots of the old-fashioned need to concentrate and think clearly in times of trouble." The planes themselves are incredibly strong and the traveler's fear of turbulence is misplaced. Planes are the most weather-worthy of vehicles, stronger than even pilots can imagine. ( )

William is apparently the son of Wolfgang, who wrote Stick and Rudder, and is a staff writer for Atlantic Monthly.
In the first section, “The View from Above,” L. declares his belief “that flight’s greatest gift is to let us look around,” and he illustrates by describing the view from various kinds of airplanes—paragliders powered and unpowered, jets, and small airplanes flown just high enough (he also described flying an air-taxi too low, in self-defense). “The best views are views of familiar things.” Disparaging his own proposal that every high school offer paragliding courses, L. says “we have taught ourselves . . . to worship safety.”
The second essay, “The Stranger’s Path,” is L.’s homage to John Brinckerhoff Jackson, founder of Landscape (1951-1968), whom L. never met. Jackson, though, espoused what he called “vernacular” landscape, which seems to agree with some L.’s ideas about familiar things making the best views, or that unspoiled landscape isn’t as interesting as that upon which people have made a mark. Also, L. thinks Jackson, though not an aviator himself, espoused an “aerial view” that is mainly “a frank and distant way of seeing one’s surroundings even when on the ground.” Jackson was a patrician who tried most of his life to become a common man. His A Sense of Place, A sense of Time (1995) won the PEN best essays award.
In “The Turn,” L. gives a short history of flight and points out that it does not become practical until the Wright brothers figure out how to turn an airship. The turn is strange, because a normal one is not experienced as such by those flying: gravity operates toward the floor of the airplane, and it is the scene outside the window that seems to move. When there is no ground reference, pilots’ instincts and perceptions will not keep them out of deadly spirals, and L. recounts the history of the pilots and engineers who developed gyroscope instruments to tell the plane’s real attitude to the pilot. But even experienced pilots can be confused and decide the instruments are wrong, as L. shows in “On a Bombay Night,” about the crash of a 747 in 1978.
In his early days, L. was a cargo pilot based in San Francisco, often flying through bad weather with faulty equipment. “Inside an Angry Sky” describes bad weather flying he does deliberately much later, and its narrative is interspersed with discussions of weather and weathermen. L. argues that the weatherman’s large view is necessarily different from the pilot’s, but that both are trying to understand: “We fly the forecast, turn, and probe the forecast’s flaws. But we are not theoreticians. 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 disorderly world.”
That last sentence is revealing because it suggest that when L. the writer looks for patterns in his experience, he sees them as a flyer. Thus when he talks about weather, about air traffic controllers as in the next chapter, or about airline accidents, he does so from the perspective of the pilot.
“Slam and Jam” uses Newark’s airport—busier than JFK or La Guardia—to talk about air traffic control and its problems. But, “despite what the public has been led to believe,” controllers don’t “guide” airplanes, and if they all stopped what they were doing, the planes in the air would find their way safely to the ground. Controllers are there to keep the traffic moving as fast as possible, but there is growing friction between them and their superiors, who are FAA managers who listen too much to what the airlines want and have lost touch with the actual job. Moreover, air traffic keeps increasing while the number of runways to handle it stays pretty much the same.
In the last chapter, “Valuejet 592,” L. considers the possibility of what Charles Perrow calls “normal accidents” or “system accidents”: in very complex systems serious failures are bound to happen, and if they are compounded, accidents are inevitable when the system speed is high: space travel, chemical or nuclear plants, air travel. Perrow’s book was Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (1984). L. doesn’t think much of Perrow but he believes the theory, which he read of in Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (1993). L. doesn’t think re-regulation is the answer because it would make air travel more expensive and more restricted, but also because solutions—new regulations—add to the complexity of the system and thus make accidents more likely. ( )

Subtitle notwithstanding, this is less a meditation on flight than a collection of articles about it. The articles vary in subject matter, tone, and--to be honest--success. Langewiesche, a regular contributor to Atlantic Monthly, is at his best when he's writing in journalistic mode. His dissection of why a veteran Air India captain flew his plane into the sea is fascinating, and his use of the ValuJet 592 crash in the Everglades (which becomes a meditation on the risks involved in flying) is even better. Oddly, the least successful segments are the most personal, reflective ones. The son of a flier who literally "wrote the book" on stick-and-rudder skills and a pilot himself since childhood, Langewiesche frequently calls attention to the distinction between "us pilots" vs. "you non-pilots." Other pilot authors--Antoine de St. Exupery, Ernest K. Gann, Richard Bach--have done the same, but as a prelude to saying "let me tell you about my world." Langewiesche is less welcoming. He insists so strongly, and so often, on the distinction that the effect is distancing and, for me, ultimately off-putting.

There is much in this book to interest readers, pilots or not, who love flying. Individual parts are better than the whole, however, and the whole falls well short of aviation classics like Wind, Sand, and Stars, Fate is the Hunter or Nothing By Chance. ( )