Whit Bazemore

Are you dreaming to fly? Nowadays people have several options to fulfill such a dream – much more than in the near past. You can try things like flying an ultralight airplane, making BASE jumps, flying a hang glider or paraglider, skydiving and indoor skydiving. In this article I’ll focus on two of the most popular options – both are “engine free” – flying your own light sport aircraft is really complex and expensive, so let’s not talk about that. Let’s instead of that see whether Paragliding or Skydiving is the right sport for you.What Is Paragliding?Paragliding is a recreational activity, considered an extreme sport, practiced by using an engine-free aircraft. The aircraft used in paragliding are extremely simple and they are often called just “wings”. A typical paraglider consists of a fabric wing and a harness. There is no cockpit like in the “real” gliders neither a hard guitar songs wing like the ones that hang gliders have. Exactly this however is one of the important reasons for the raising popularity of paragliding – paragliders are affordable and don’t take much space.You can even put one in a large backpack, which certainly can’t be done with a glider.In paragliding you are launching the aircraft by foot – usually people use hills where they run and jump to start flying. Paragliding gives you good amount of control over the flight. Although not generally used for transportation, paragliders can serve for this purpose because one flight can continue up to several hours. Of course that depends on the weather conditions, your skills and other factors.What is SkydivingSkydiving looks similar to paragliding because of the equipment but the similarities probably end here. Skydiving is an extreme sport that involves jumping with a parachute from an airplane.