Plenty of Strings Attached by Clive Tully

“Don't look at me. Don't look at the ground. Fix your eye on the reference point over there." The point in question is a distant Morecambe Bay, glistening in the sunlight, and I'm about to part company with the gentle limestone outcrop-dotted hills of the Yorkshire Dales, held aloft by nothing more than a few kilos of nylon. But the ultimate target is to land safely in the field below, where the sheep have learned to keep a respectful distance from large brightly coloured objects descending out of the heavens.

Rob Lund, an instructor with the Austwick-based company Active Edge, helps me steady the canopy as it comes overhead. The wind starts to catch it and push it to one side, but I manage to steer it back into position. "That's it, now go for it!"

I push myself forward, and suddenly my feet are walking on air. I'm trying to remember what to do, take in the view, and follow the last instruction "Cross your legs!" as I sail away from the hillside.

I drift smoothly fieldwards, and as I approach the ground, push my hands holding the brake lines right down as far as they can go. The canopy flares, and my feet alight onto the grass with no more impact than if I'd stepped out of a railway carriage.

"Helps keep you more stable in the air if your legs aren't waving about," says Rob when I catch up with him later, breathless from the slog back up the hill with armfuls of canopy.

In a one-day taster of paragliding with Active Edge, I manage to achieve several exhilarating flights, but not without some thorough grounding first.

"Safe paragliding is all about selecting the right site for the conditions," I'm told. "The wind needs to be coming uphill, ideally at around 10mph. It needs to be coming square onto the side of the hill, and there shouldn't be any gusts - where the windspeed either doubles or halves in less than a minute. There's a lot of throwing handfuls of grass into the air!"

It also entails checking out the landing site and ground upwind for obstacles which could create turbulence. Moving air reacts in virtually the same way as water. So you have to watch out for eddies where it hits a wall, trees or other obstacles. And of course, it pays to have a landing site without anything likely to do you or the canopy any damage as you descend.

My fellow student Amanda and I are both issued with a rucksack containing canopy, harness and helmet. "As with any aircraft," explains Rob, "the first thing you do is a pre-flight check. Especially when you're flying a canopy previously used by someone else."

We spend the next 20 minutes or so giving the first canopy a thorough going over. We unroll it cell by cell, inspecting the fabric and stitching of the upper surface, which takes most of the load. Having established that it is not past its "cell by" date, we turn our attention to the myriad bits of string attached underneath, known in the trade as risers.

"Why are they different colours?" asks Amanda.

"They're different groups - A's and B's. The yellow ones attached to the leading edge are A's, whilst the risers going to the trailing edge are B's, - they're blue," says Rob.

We run each bit of riser through our fingers, checking visually and by feel for any cuts, snags or bumps which might indicate a problem with the Kevlar lines beneath their protective sheathing. Then we check our harnesses - no relation to a traditional parachute harness - more like a soft portable seat.

Our first effort to get to grips with all this unfamiliar kit takes place well down the hill, where the wind is less strong. At first, we have a couple of goes at simply inflating the canopy, with Rob hanging on to us to ensure we aren't towed backwards up the hill.

There are two ways of launching a paraglider, depending on the strength of the wind.

At slower windspeeds, the Alpine, or forward launch is possible, where you simply run forwards, snapping the canopy above your head, then you keep running until you are airborne. At faster windspeeds, you have to do a reverse launch, where you face the canopy, lean back to get it up above you, then spin round to take off. This one takes a fair bit of practice, and a good deal of time is spent on it on the longer courses.

Having got the feel of how the wind grabs hold of the canopy the moment it's airborne, we progress to our first flights, albeit with Rob keeping us attached with 50 feet of rope.

"Now I know what a dog feels like being taken for a walk," comments Amanda as Rob attaches the tether to her harness. She takes off and drifts down the hillside, with Rob running like a madman to stay below her and shout out instructions. And with just a couple of tethered flights under our belts, we move on to the real thing - our first free-flights.

A whoop drifts along the wind as Amanda sails into the air. "You shouldn't really do that," says Rob. "Shows you aren't concentrating. But everybody does it at first," he adds with a grin.

My own first free-flight somehow lacks Amanda's forward momentum on take-off. This was explained to me afterwards as the difference created by my extra weight with a canopy of the same size. I take off briefly, make inelegant contact with the ground 20 feet down the hill, then take off again. But by the end of the day, we've progressed to launches from the top of the ridge, about 150ft above the landing area. Here there's no gradual run-out. You literally step off the hill into space.

Paragliding as a sport has only been around for 30 years or so and, in many respects, it is still evolving. Paragliders trace their pedigree back to the original ram air parachutes developed in the 1960s by the American space agency, NASA. But unlike the porous fabric of the ram air 'chutes, which simply allowed you to glide down at a rate of one in one, paragliders are made from lightweight coated fabric - essentially inflatable wings. In the right conditions, you can soar on thermals for hours, and even do a "top landing", coming back to earth at the same point from which you took off.

"I wonder what Wilbur and Orville Wright would have thought of paragliders," muses my instructor. "Leonardo da Vinci, even. Paragliding is the realisation of man's dream to fly like the birds. Well, maybe not like birds - more like Peter Pan."