Paragliding
soaring or thermaling with a paraglider
Paragliding is the recreational and competitive adventure sport of flying paragliders: lightweight, free-flying, foot-launched glider aircraft with no rigid primary structure. The pilot sits in a harness or in a cocoon-like 'pod' suspended below a fabric wing. Wing shape is maintained by the suspension lines, the pressure of air entering vents in the front of the wing, and the aerodynamic forces of the air flowing over the outside.
Despite not using an engine, paraglider flights can last many hours and cover many hundreds of kilometres, though flights of one to five hours and covering some tens of kilometres are more the norm. By skillful exploitation of sources of lift, the pilot may gain height, often climbing to altitudes of a few thousand metres.
History
In 1954, Walter Newmark predicted (in an article in Flight magazine) a time when a glider pilot would be "able to launch himself by running over the edge of a cliff or down a slope ... whether on a rock-climbing holiday in Skye or skiing in the Alps."
In 1961, the French engineer Pierre Lemongine produced improved parachute designs that led to the Para-Commander (PC). The Para-Commander had cutouts at the rear and sides that enabled it to be towed into the air and steered, leading to parasailing/parascending.
In 1963, Canadian Domina Jalbert filed US Patent 3131894 for a multi-cell wing type aerial device —"a wing having a flexible canopy constituting an upper skin and with a plurality of longitudinally extending ribs forming in effect a wing corresponding to an airplane wing airfoil ... More particularly the invention contemplates the provision of a wing of rectangular or other shape having a canopy or top skin and a lower spaced apart bottom skin"— a governable gliding parachute with aerofoil shaped cells, an open leading edge, and a closed trailing edge inflated by passage through the air; a ram-air parafoil,
About that time, David Barish was developing the sail wing (single-surface wing) for recovery of NASA space capsules—"slope soaring was a way of testing out ...
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Paragliding” is soaring or thermaling with a paraglider. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Paragliding, soaring and thermaling, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q178380. The Library of Congress control number is sh97002619. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1961 and 1963.
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