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If you have found yourself in the right place at the right time on some recent evening in Athens, and happened to look up at the sky, you may have seen a man flying through the air, hanging from a sort of brightly-colored kite. If you did, the man you saw was almost certainly Chris Lyons.
About five or six times a month on average, the 27-year-old nurse anesthetist from The Plains finds himself a big, open field – one of his favorites is on the banks of the Hocking, across the street from the Sonic restaurant on Stimson Avenue.
There, he straps onto his back a 55-pound, circular red metal frame with a gas engine and a wooden propeller about three feet long; it looks like something you'd see on the back of an Everglades fan boat.
To the harness on his torso, Lyons hooks up the many thin cords of a huge, oblong parachute, made of tissue-thin synthetic fabric. He gives a few yanks on the starter rope; the German-made two-stroke engine roars into life; and the propeller kicks out a powerful forward thrust that could knock a man off his feet if he wasn't ready for it.
Then, with a hand-held throttle in his fist, Lyons charges forward. Air billows into the pockets of the parachute, yanking it upward. After a short takeoff run – usually only about 20 or 30 feet – Lyons is airborne.
"I think that at some point, every child thinks that they want to fly," Lyons explained Friday, as he demonstrated the workings of his "powered paraglider" for the benefit of two local journalists. "And it's always been a dream of mine to fly. But I've never had the funding to do so."
That changed when Lyons spotted the paraglider on eBay. He promptly plunked down around $8,500 for the rig, and slipped the surly bonds of earth.
"It's such a free feeling, with the wind in your face," Lyons said. "You've got the ability to fly low, and slow."
Another advantage of a powered paraglider – classified as an "ultralight" aircraft by the Federal Aviation Administration – is that there are virtually no regulations on its operation. You don't need a pilot's license to fly one, and though Lyons said some training is needed, it's not much.
"I learned it in three days," he recalled, noting that his wife has also taken a few flights.
The sport is fairly safe, though not without a few hazards. Lyons estimated the dangers involved as somewhere "between driving a car and riding a motorcycle." Common sense, he said, dictates not flying over heavily populated areas or large congregations of people, staying away from tall buildings, and the like. He also flies during the cooler evening hours, to avoid the thermal updrafts that can occur during the warmer hours of the day. If he runs into stormy weather, he takes the craft down quickly.
Lyons does have one scary story to relate, however.
Prior to getting his current wooden fan blade, he said, he had a carbon-fiber propeller; he lost that during a flight when his engine's muffler broke off, hit the blade, and snapped off its ends.
Lyons promptly cut power with a kill switch, and took advantage of the paraglider's long, shallow descent path – about one foot of drop for every seven feet of forward motion.
In addition to buzzing along the Hocking, Lyons sometimes hits "fly-ins" in Ohio and nearby states. With a full tank of gas, he said, he can fly for three hours, though he usually gets his fill after about 90 minutes or so. Theoretically, he could get nearly three-and-a-half miles up, though he said he's never gone higher than about 8,000 feet.
"It gets a little cold up there, and the air gets kind of thin," he noted.
While ultralight flying like Lyons' is reportedly increasing in popularity, it's hardly what you'd call a major fad in this state.
Bruce Brown, owner of Ohio Powered Paragliding in Bowling Green, Ohio, which sells paragliding equipment and provides training, said powered paragliding has been around since the late 1980s. He estimated that about 50 to 75 enthusiasts pursue the sport in Ohio.
"There are groups that are flying in most of (Ohio's) major cities," Brown said. "So yes, it is gaining support. But it's kind of a niche thing. I don't think it's ever going to go mainstream."
Like Lyons, however, Brown said that for those who like it, powered paragliding provides a thrill like no other.
"To me, it's just the freedom to run across the ground, and fly away," he explained. "To literally go out to a field, run across the ground, and fly away."
