William Langewiesche – författare

On January 15, 2009, a US Airways Airbus A320 had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport in New York, when a flock of Canada geese collided with it, destroying both of its engines. Over the next three minutes, the plane's pilot Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger, managed to glide to a safe landing in the Hudson River. It was an instant media sensation, the "The Miracle on the Hudson", and Captain Sully was the hero. But, how much of the success of this dramatic landing can actually be credited to the genius of the pilot? To what extent is the "Miracle on the Hudson" the result of extraordinary - but not widely known, and in some cases quite controversial - advances in aviation and computer technology over the last twenty years?From the testing laboratories where engineers struggle to build a jet engine that can systematically resist bird attacks, through the creation of the A320 in France, to the political and social forces that have sought to minimize the impact of the revolutionary fly-by-wire technology, William Langewiesche assembles the untold stories necessary to truly understand "The Miracle on the Hudson", and makes us question our assumptions about human beings in modern aviation.

Reissued to coincide with the 10-year anniversary, AMERICAN GROUND is a classic of frontline reportage and the definitive first-person account of the aftermath of 9/11. One of the most controversial pieces of 9/11 publishing the book is the result of Langewiesche's nine months in the Dantesque world of Ground Zero. With 'truth, unclouded by sentiment' (NEW YORK TIMES), he documented the lives of the engineers, labourers, rescue workers and city officials as they brought order to a land of chaos, anatomising the physical details of the collapse and revealing the contests of politics and personality that were its aftershock.