Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight - Softcover

Langewiesche, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067975007X ISBN 13: 9780679750079

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

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, a text still considered by many to be the bible of aerial navigation.  Langewiesche himself learned to fly while still a child.  Now he shares his pilot's-eye view of flight with those of us who take flight for granted--exploring the inner world of a sky that remains as exotic and revealing as the most foreign destination.

Langewiesche tells us how flight happens--what the pilot sees, thinks, and feels.  His description is not merely about speed and conquest.  It takes the form of a deliberate climb, leading at low altitude first over a new view of a home, and then higher, into the solitude of the cockpit, through violent storms and ocean nights, and on to unexpected places in the mind.

In Langewiesche's hands it becomes clear, at the close of this first century of flight, how profoundly our vision has been altered by our liberation from the ground.  And we understand how, when we look around, we may find ourselves reflected in the grace and turbulence of a human sky.

About this title

Review:

William Langewiesche seems drawn to those vast, open landscapes that challenge both body and soul. In Sahara Unveiled, he traversed the length of that inhospitable desert from Algiers to Timbuktu, along the way limning an intimate portrait of the environment and the people who inhabit it. In Inside the Sky Langewiesche meditates on a different wilderness as he explores the ramifications of flight. "Mechanical wings allow us to fly," he writes, "but it is with our minds that we make the sky ours."

And it is chiefly flight's workings on our perceptions and our imagination that interests Langewiesche. "Flying at its best is a way of thinking.... 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." Flying has, in fact, changed humankind's perception of itself. Discussing the borderlands along the Rio Grande, Langewiesche points out that from the air it is impossible to disregard the great differences in wealth and environment between Mexico and the United States:

"The narrowness of the view is a problem particular to the ground. Few tourists ever went to Presidio, but those who did often got the astonishing impression that the border there hardly existed. Residents, too, because they freely forded the river, could share that illusion. But from the air the view always widens.... What the ordinary aerial view really shows is exactly the opposite of a unified world."

Langewiesche writes eloquently and at length about flight's influence on politics, environmentalism, culture, and human psychology, punctuating these musings with fascinating accounts of real people--everyone from Otto Lilienthal, a 19th-century German engineer who died while testing a hang glider, to Walton Little, a computer engineer and private pilot who happened to be an eyewitness to the 1996 Valujet air disaster. Bad weather, crowded airports, plane crashes, and the physics of flying all form part of the tapestry as Langewiesche weaves history, science, philosophy, and his own experiences as a pilot into this tough, tender paean to the miracle of flight. --Alix Wilber

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Sahara Unveiled by William Langewiesche

"Deploying a prose reminiscent of Paul Bowles or Bruce Chatwin . . . Sahara Unveiled often deepens to sudden insights that lift it into a spare poetry."

--New York Times Book Review

"A reader's dream. . . . With spare, lyrical cadences and cool sensuality, Langewiesche summons up the landscape itself. Sahara Unveiled has a masterful dry chill to it, a power that stays coiled and ready to spring and a prose that fits its subject as cleanly as skin to the bone."

--Seattle Times

"Like Charles Doughty, Freya Stark, T. E. Lawrence, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Wilfred Thesiger, Langewiesche finds places of his own amid the vast mysteries of the desert. His travels are filled with intense characters and scenes so vivid you can feel the grit between your teeth."
--The Advocate Literary Supplement

"Langewiesche exploits the harshness, forlornness, and political hopelessness of the vast desert to fashion an entertaining and edifying tale."

--New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 067975007X
• ISBN 13: 9780679750079
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 258