Excerpt from Inside The Sky by William Langewiesche, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There is risk to any flight, of course, and pilots do die in paragliders. They die not because paragliding is unregulated--though in the United States it remains delightfully so--but because of the physics of flight. The slowest and simplest flying machines are particularly vulnerable to the winds and dependent upon the pilot's athletic reactions. Those reactions take a while to develop. Wilbur and Orville Wright, who started as bicycle builders in Dayton, Ohio, set about designing, building, and flying the world's first practical airplanes after reading Lilenthal's obituary in the local newspaper. Their most important insight was that lift alone was not enough--that once in flight the pilot would have to be given absolute control of the wing. They were careful, cerebral men, but also supremely Midwestern and pragmatic. During their early experiments with gliding in 1901, Wilbur wrote, "If you are looking for perfect safety you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds, but if you really wish to learn you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial."

This remains almost as true today. Despite our accumulated knowledge of the air, the best way to go about paragliding is not to sign up for a class but simply to borrow a wing and run downhill with it. Borrow a helmet, too, and choose a calm day and a shallow slope--but indulge in the risk. In each hand you hold a handle connected by shrouds to the trailing edge of the wing. Those handles function as the glider's only controls. To turn, you pull one or the other, twisting the fabric of the wing to spoil the lift in the direction you want to go. Because the paraglider flies slowly, at bicycle speeds, it requires only a shallow bank to turn quickly. At the end of the flight, as you skim the ground, you pull both handles at once, causing the entire wing to rear up and to slow further until against a light wind you put your feet down and land with a few steps--or instead, as I have, you go about gently crashing.

The slowness of the paraglider is the feature that interests me here, not because it makes for soft landings but because it promises in theory to provide ordinary humans with the most detailed yet of the aerial views. Sometimes I think that people should, after all, take classes in paragliding, but that those classes should be taught at every public high school in the country and offered as alternatives not only to gym but to the tedious courses in "civics" and American geography. This is not a serious proposal, of course, because we have taught ourselves if anything to worship safety--to fasten our seatbelts, to act responsibly, and to follow the reasonable paths through life. Opfer müssen nicht gebracht werden. Imagine the price to pay each time a student landed badly and was injured or killed. But imagine also the arrival of an entire generation in which people truly had learned to see themselves from above.

Such dreaming aside, paragliders in recent years have encountered a practical problem masked as an advance. Through steady improvements in their design and construction, the gliding performance of these sky-sails keeps getting better, and is now nearly fifteen to one, which means they can fly fifteen feet forward for every foot they descend. This does not approach the sixty-to-one ratios of enclosed sailplanes, but it is about that of delta-wing hang gliders. Accompanying the flattened glide angle is a lessening of sink rates to about 200 feet per minute. The numbers are important because they are more than matched by the vertical fluctuations of ordinary winds. As a result, paraglider pilots can now soar, which means they can ride updrafts, gain altitude, stay aloft for hours, and even fly trips of a hundred miles and more. My own small regret is that these possibilities encourage a record-setting mentality in which flying becomes a "sport" turned in on itself and pilots come to consider the landscape only for the chances it creates--the coastal ridge, the sun-heated parking lot, the swirl of dust that marks the start of rising air. To soar you have to stay high and exploit every opportunity. The ground becomes the enemy. You can't afford to see it in detail.

Use of this excerpt from Inside the Sky by William Langewiesche may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice: Copyright© 1998 by William Langewiesche. All rights reserved