Tugged skyward by updrafts in the Alps

April 23, 2006|David Arnold, Globe Correspondent

CHAMONIX -- Cyrilde Pinard had the gentle voice and calm demeanor of a woman who could have been selling sneakers, but instead was telling me to jump off a cliff.

Some 3,000 feet below was the town of Chamonix. Just overhead, a yellow, parachute-shaped airfoil -- a paraglider -- was taking shape as it prepared to take me and pilot Pinard aloft in tandem flight.

''Run," she said.

Except in dreams and reruns of ''Thelma and Louise," I had no experience leaping into voids. But run I did, propelled less by self-discipline than by the conviction that one never wimps out in the presence of a woman.

Dashing toward oblivion, our harnesses went taut and then started tugging us skyward -- long before we reached the brink. And as the earth fell away, I nestled into the lap of the woman to whom I had just entrusted my life. We began to rise like a pair of eagles playfully embracing the updrafts taking us ever higher above our launch site. Gravity and gravitas were left behind; I settled back into the arms of my pilot.

Let the fantasy begin.

There are many ways for human beings to experience flight. To my mother's chagrin, I've tried most of them. You can fly airplanes or jump from them, dangle from hang gliders, soar in sailplanes, or churn along like a flying chaise longue in a noisy ultralight. Nothing, however, comes close to the controlled, quiet flight offered in paragliding, a sport that allows you to hang your feet into space like a slow-motion dream.

Then when the ride ends, you stuff your ''airplane" back in a knapsack, ride a ski lift up, and do it again.

''I never tire of this. It is reverie," Pinard explained in a mix of English and French late last summer. ''And I get to do it five times a day."

Pinard, 36, is a Chamonix (pronounced sham-oh-NEE) native and mother who has been teaching the sport and taking tourists aloft for the better part of 16 years.

She flies for Summits, which was founded in 1987 and is one of the oldest paragliding schools in Europe.

The paraglider is an adaptation of the parachute that has been aerodynamically reconfigured to allow a highly maneuverable glide at a meandering pace. The glide slope of a paraglider is 10:1, meaning that for every 10 horizontal feet it travels, it drops one foot. The down side is that in the arena of powerless flight, a paraglider's glide ratio pales in comparison with the 15:1 glide of a hang glider (a rigid-framed wing from which the pilot dangles) or the 60:1 glide of a competition sailplane.

The upside is price; as glide slope climbs, so does the cost -- from a $2,000 paraglider to a $7,000 hang glider to a $200,000 sailplane. Of the three, the paraglider is the only one that returns to a backpack like a genie to a lamp.