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

One answer is to abandon soaring and strap an engine to your back, and this indeed is now done. Again the French have led the way. They call the result the powered paraglider and have established enough of a following to support two stores in Paris alone. The wing is slightly shorter. The engine is mounted on a backframe and drives a four-bladed pusher-propeller in a wire cage--an arrangement, including fuel and a small battery for in-flight electrical starts, which weighs about thirty pounds, and which the pilot wears in addition to the standard wing harness. This time along with the control handles, you hold a throttle lever connected by cable to the engine. You take off downhill or on level ground after a short run into the wind with the engine roaring. For the outside observer it is a peculiar sight: this two-legged animal with a parachute overhead and noisy machinery strapped to his back, running awkwardly across a field, then retracting his legs and flying. It is peculiar for the pilot too, until your wings take hold and pull you into the sky. Then suddenly it feels quite natural. The powered paraglider may be the most primitive airplane that has ever existed, but it offers a genuine form of flight. You can climb in it one mile high and hover there for hours.

Better yet you can pack it into an airliner, then unpack it somewhere new and fly it low. I have a Parisian friend named Franois Lagarde, a pioneer of this technique, who has flown his powered paraglider across Tunisia, Niger, Cameroon, Martinique, and Thailand. Even the most timid traditionalists would have to admit that thereby he has "visited" those places. Other than making occasional adjustments to the wing, he has little to do in flight but to look around. Lagarde flies low, sometimes below the treetops, following footprints and trails, chasing rabbits. He maneuvers among giraffes and elephants and smells the dry dung and wet earth, the grasses, trees, and flowers. He waves to villagers and alights like a bird in those villages where people wave back. He flies in the United States and France as well, and he talks of China next. All this may seem like another exercise in European adventurism, but Lagarde is not a faddist. There are good reasons for his obsession. He is extroverted and social and unafraid, and he wants to experience the world in its full vitality. He knows that the view from above is frank and unobstructed. And he has learned that the very low view, when it is also very slow, is often also intimate.

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