William Langewiesche has written no end of wonderful pieces about flight. This makes sense; his father Wolfgang wrote the definitive text on the subject back in 1944, so young William grew up with flight, and indeed worked as a pilot himself for years before taking up writing.

Eventually working with both Vanity Fair and The Atlantic, Langewiesche has won two National Magazine Awards, and been nominated for many others — and not always about flight. He’s written about the Sahara, the unbuilding of the World Trade Center, and nuclear proliferation in the third world, international shipping, and the Chilean mining disaster.

But it’s in flight that he seems to be the most compelling to me. Over the years he’s covered the so-called Miracle on the Hudson, the Columbia disaster, the now-nearly-forgotten collision of planes over the Amazon in 2006, and, most compellingly, about the 1999 crash of EgyptAir 990

This month, in the Atlantic, he has a new piece, on the loss of flight MH370; it appears that we now have as close to a rock solid explanation as we’re likely to get, given Malaysian corruption and the realities of ocean searches. Sadly, this situation has a lot in common with EgyptAir 990.

The piece is long, but it’s very good, and well worth your time.