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.