William Langewiesche

William Langewiesche, aged 70, died of cancer on June 15, 2025, in East Lyme, Connecticut. Langewiesche was a longtime professional airplane pilot who wrote for small aviation magazines until 1991, when he wrote a cover story for The Atlantic, "The World in Its Extreme," about the Sahara desert. Then for decades he worked as a correspondent for general interest magazines, reporting from around the world, in peace as in war. He was the author of many classics of nonfiction narrative, including American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, Aloft: Thoughts on the Experience of Flight, and The Atomic Bazaar: Dispatches from the Underground World of Nuclear Trafficking. He believed that what can go wrong usually goes right, but then people draw the wrong conclusions-and he said that sentence "should be on my grave." He is survived by his wife Tia Cibani and his children Matthew, Anna, Castine, and Archibald Langewiesche.