An Uplifting Experience

My recreational résumé, you should know, is a lot closer to Walter Mitty's than to Evel Knievel's. I surf with body, not board. New Hampshire's Mount Washington, 6,288 feet, is the highest I've ever climbed above sea level. And I've yet to push the two-wheeled, motor-driven envelope past leisurely excursions on mopeds in Bermuda.

So I had always considered my chances of flying solo in an aircraft as slightly better than, say, the likelihood of my going bungee jumping. Then I read a newspaper article about something called a ParaPlane. My first reaction? Here's an aircraft even I might be able to handle. The ParaPlane's speed is 26 miles per hour. It takes only an hour or so of flight training to solo. No pilot's license is required. To go up in the ParaPlane, you just push forward on the throttle. Descend? Pull back on the throttle. To turn right, push on a lever with your right foot. To turn left, push with your left foot. I also liked the part about the parachute. It somehow sounded safer.

A ParaPlane, as its name implies, is a power-driven parachute. The power is provided by twin 15-horsepower, two-stroke engines with counter-rotating propellers located, airboat style, behind a three-wheeled rig not much more elaborate than a go-kart. The canopy is a rectangular parachute similar to those used by sky divers. It functions like a wing, providing more than enough lift for the pilot and the 200-pound craft. In the unlikely event that both engines fail, a ParaPlane can drift earthward with no loss of steering, descending at less than half the vertical speed of a sky diver with a chute deployed. There would be no harm in at least checking out the ParaPlane, I figured.

"I never met a person who hasn't dreamed of flying," says Barry Shellington, 44, an effervescent financial and insurance consultant who runs Para-Flying Inc. in Paoli, Pa. "I read about ParaPlanes in 1985, went up in one, and a month and a half later I bought a dealership." Shellington's is one of some 50 ParaPlane dealerships around the world; there are outlets in Japan, Australia, Israel and Turkey as well as the U.S. Shellington invited me to a Saturday-morning training session for beginners, promising, "You'll fly. I guarantee you'll fly."

Around 7 a.m. on a crisp spring morning, two instructors and five would-be fliers assembled near the grassy airfield at New Hanover Airport, not far from Potts-town, Pa. The instructors wore ParaPlane polo shirts. The students wore looks similar to those you might see in a high school hallway half an hour before the "Begin work" on SAT morning. Although Shellington's classes often draw New Yorkers, everyone in this group hailed from Pennsylvania. There was Fran Kaminsky from Philadelphia, who owns a commercial cleaning service. And Judy and Jeff Haudenschield, from the town of Moscow. Judy is an advertising executive; Jeff, an insurance agent. They brought a friend, Rob Widaman, a register representative for a financial services company, who lives in Mount Cobb. Jeff, who has the build of a linebacker, had dropped a few pounds during the week to get down to 230, the upper limit for ParaPlane pilots flying the model the school used. "He's been like a wrestler trying to make weight," said Judy.

Directed to an unprepossessing yellow building just off the runway, we were soon seated in a small office, 20-page training manuals in hand. An instructor slipped a cassette into a VCR. Reveille sounded "to make sure everybody's awake," said a man on the tape who identified himself as an attorney. "I'd like to welcome you to the adventure of powered-parachute flying. Notice the word I used: adventure. Adventure implies risk...."

Slowly, in plain English, not legalese, he led us through a 20-paragraph document. He told us that in signing the document, we would assume all risk and agree not to sue anyone connected with the aircraft or the flying school should there be an accident. Though unspoken, the word "death" hung in the air. I thought of my wife and two young children.

Thanks to the video, the flight manual and a 15-question multiple-choice test, we students quickly became acquainted with the ParaPlane. We learned that it was invented in the early 1980s by Steve Snyder, an aeronautical engineer in Pennsauken, N.J., who is known in aviation circles for designing an automatic opening device for recreational and military parachutes. An accomplished commercial and instrument-rated pilot, Snyder created his powered parachute with three goals in mind: simplicity, affordability and safety.

Simple it is. The instrument panel consists of a single small mirror the pilot uses to check that the parachute is properly inflated before takeoff. When collapsed, the whole rig is small enough to fit in the trunk of a midsize car.

Shellington sells a ParaPlane (manufactured at Snyder's factory in Pennsauken, N.J.) for $7,395, minus the $135 cost of the first lesson. There's no cheaper way to own your own wings. (Several of Snyder's competitors offer kits, which vary in price but usually cost slightly more depending on the model. Most of these companies also sell kits for two-seaters, but only a licensed pilot is permitted to carry a passenger.)