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

But if not a blurring, there is indeed a visual frustration to such high-speed treetop flight, and it is a structural one. The details which pass by slowly enough to make sense of are precisely those details which lie too far away to see clearly. For example, you know it's a house that just went by, but for lack of time or clarity you cannot consider its design and setting, or the litter in its back yard--the house as an expression of its inhabitants. The airplane jars through upwelling surface winds. Its speed dominates your thoughts like an obsession. No matter how you twist and turn, you cannot get beyond it.

Even at a relatively slow 200 miles an hour, speed may rob the low view of its content. The obvious solution is to throttle back and fly still more slowly--and that indeed you can do, though not economically in a jet. I will ignore the levitational magic of helicopters, which can hover in any direction, matching the contours of the land, but which are inefficient, disruptive, and nearly as expensive as a jet to operate. For about the cost of driving a car you can fly an old two-seat, propeller-driven airplane and float low across the countryside at road speeds--slow enough to see the hats on the farmers and to judge the quality of their work.

And even that now seems too fast. Let children dream of their supersonic futures. For today's practitioner, the advance is rather at the other end of the scale, with a foot-launched aircraft in which the pilot hangs on shrouds from a wing made of loose fabric like a sail. How appropriate that the French, who are good sailors, have championed this form of aircraft. Calling it the paraglider, they developed it in the 1980s as an alternative to standard delta-wing hang gliders, which are exhilarating to fly, and reasonably safe, but which suffer from the weight and bulk of their tubular frames even when disassembled. The paraglider by contrast has no frame, weighs about the same as a family's picnic lunch, and can be stuffed into a rucksack and carried easily up a mountain. In essence, it is a rectangular high-performance parachute, a close relative to the tethered "parasails" pulled by powerboats at beach resorts, with the important difference that it has no connection to the ground and flies independently, under the pilot's control.

High on some mountain, you invert the fabric on the ground behind you, strap yourself into a seat-harness, and with a tug on the shrouds allow the wind to send the wing aloft directly overhead, where it assumes a cambered form and floats at the ready. With a short run downhill you give it flying speed. It answers by lifting you off your feet, and beginning to coast downhill toward the valley below. Once it gains speed it flattens its glide angle, and takes you out across the trees, the ravines, and the valley itself. The experience is primordial, a feeling of lift and wind like a throwback to the earliest elemental era of flight, before the Wright brothers, when pioneers like the great Berliner Otto Lilienthal floated downhill on homemade wings.

Lilienthal was a mechanical engineer, the manager of a factory that manufactured small steam engines. He crashed and died in 1898, at age forty-eight, after having made 2,000 hang gliding flights, the longest of which lasted fifteen seconds. It seems quaint now that he flew only on weekends and that he fell to his death at walking speed from only fifty feet up--but he was doing serious work, and he knew it. The epitaph on his tombstone records his famous words, Opfer müssen gebracht werden, or "Sacrifices must be made." If that now seems like the wrong way to approach the weekend, it was the right way in the 1890s, because at any cost the time had come for human flight.

The difference for us today is not that the designs have improved, though they have, but that as a species we have now had a century of experience inside the sky. The modern paraglider does not advance history but offers the human animal a bit of stitched fabric, some lines, and a harness--a cheap personal portable wing. The flying of such aircraft has become an indulgence and does not call for heroics. In turn, this means that our flying is safer.

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