A leap of faith: What’s it like to paraglide off Mount Tom?

“I know it’s not normal to run off a cliff, but all you have to do is look out and run like hell.” 

That was my last pep talk from expert paraglider John Gallagher moments before we sprinted off the 1,200-foot-high cliffside on Mount Tom’s peak for a tandem flight on a glorious summer afternoon in July.

If your friend ran off a cliff, would you? The 10 guys I flew with had each once stood in my shoes, about to take their first paragliding flight.

Easthampton was staring straight up at me. The mill buildings. The Nonotuck Park soccer fields. Nashawannuck Pond. There I stood atop the mountain with John, a Hadley resident since 2020 who first flew off Mount Tom more than 50 years ago. John was an A+ chaperone, reassuring me throughout the process. Even so, no words of encouragement could flush away the nerves I felt in that moment.

Luckily, John had no intention of landing us on any buildings, or in the loose gravel and thicket of trees directly below. John had my back, literally, strapped into two connected harnesses for the two-person flight.

For an instructional flight such as this, a student is allowed to fly, observe and learn about paragliding with an experienced and certified tandem pilot. John is both of those things, having flown on multiple continents around the world.

“When I pull this up, take two good steps forward. Then I might say hold, or step back,” John instructed, as he prepared to whip the wing, the large, colorful fabric of the paraglider, into the air. “We’ll stop until I make sure everything is perfect, then I’ll just say run.”

This was the last of several rehearsals John had given — now it was go-time. The wing was sprawled out on the grassy launch-point just a 30-minute hike from the Log Cabin, as he waited for the right airflow to arrive.

“OK, ready?” John said, more as an alert rather than a question. “Forward, forward, forward,” two steps forward. “Back, back, back,” two steps back. “OK, just run.” You know what happens next.

“There, you just ran off a cliff,” he said as the rising winds caught the glider and puffed out each side of the wing, lifting our feet off the ground and into the sky.

On a handful of evenings in the summer, Mount Tom’s wide-reaching landscape is often accompanied by a colorful set of paragliders, swooping back and forth across the mountain ridge. It’s an image many in this part of the Valley have become accustomed to and some are very fond of watching.

“Someone said, ‘We’re (the paragliders) the butterflies flying over the mountain.’ I think it’s really cool that the community has accepted us to be a part of their beautiful view,” John said. “Mount Tom has been in people’s lives, from the beautiful views that people see everyday to the activities it provides. Just a wonderful, wonderful place.”

John said people have been flying off Mount Tom for more than 50 years, including himself. His first flight from the mountain was actually with a hang glider in the 1970s, and his first paraglide there was in 1997.

Paragliding. Hang gliding. What’s the difference? Paragliders fly upright using a fabric-style wing, the large canopy that catches air, while hang gliders fly with their bellies facing down with a flat wing. John said paragliders have more flying capabilities than hang gliders.

How do they fly?

Mount Tom’s flat, rocky cliffside, facing out toward Easthampton and the Valley, offers a prime opportunity for pilots. “Think of it like a chimney,” John said. On our hike to the top, he gave me a paragliding 101 lesson.

On a day with clear skies, the sun beams down and heats the mountain rock, propelling warm air upward for paragliders to catch. John called it a “lift-band” that stretches across the width of the mountain.

“There could be no wind blowing at all and when you get up on Mount Tom and the wind is blowing, you (may) go, ‘why is that?’ Well, the thing is heated up and it’s sucking the air right out of the Valley in front of it,” John explained.

My nerves had flown away once in the sky, for the most part. With hundreds of feet of air below your butt, John said that’s natural. “Nervous is good. Your feet are lifting off the ground. You should be nervous.”

Comfort wasn’t much of an issue. It was like sitting in a lawn chair, just in the sky. After all, John was doing all the work, but I had to help out. There are two handles, or brakes, on either side of the pilot that connect to the wing. To steer, John would pull one toggle down, firmly, while we leaned our bodies to the same side.

During the roughly 45-minute flight, John curled us back and forth around the mountain face, and I got to steer for a bit, catching the “band” to stay afloat, reaching hundreds of feet higher than Mount Tom’s peak.

That Friday’s winds were mild, John said, compared to some of the more intense flights he has taken. Yet, when we hit the right spot, it felt like someone was yanking the wing back and upward, like a bully would with the hood of a sweatshirt. All paragliders, depending on their model, have a particular “lift ratio,” determining how far they will fly without any wind changes.

John said gliders are always looking for what are called thermals — rising columns of warm air that pilots use to gain altitude. Pilots can fly great distances, as long as they find enough thermals, he said. For his last flight from Mount Tom in June, John flew all the way to Foxborough, typically an hour and a half car ride east.

“We’re looking for fields that will heat up. We’re looking for parking lots. A solar panel, surprisingly,” John said about thermals. “Anything that gets heated up faster than the ground around it.”

Lift is determined not just by thermal strength, but also by what he called “temperature dewpoint spread.” John said cool air is constantly surrounding the warm, rising air, and at a certain elevation, the two temperatures equalize. “That’s where clouds are formed, and that’s usually how high we can climb.”

Pilots can fly year-round, John added. My flight took place during an ideal summer day, but pilots often paraglide during the winter and the shoulder seasons. You just have to dress like you’re going skiing, John said.

That was the basic explanation, John said. Pilots are always considering a number of factors when looking to fly, including conditions, wind speeds, temperatures and more.

“And friends to go do it with,” John quipped.

Taking off

Based on the number of flyers the day I went, friends don’t seem hard to come by for pilots. There were several flyers preparing for launch once we arrived, including John Mendes, president of the New England Paragliding & Hang Gliding Club (NEPHC), which is a chapter of the United States Hang Gliding & Paragliding Association (USHPA).

Mendes stood with his back to the cliff and his parachute spread out on the ground in front of him, saying he was “feeling out” the air, waiting for the right gust to whip the wing up and take off. The wing is attached to a pilot’s harness by a series of lines, including the brake handles.

“You’re looking for the winds to start to increase. You don’t want it too strong,” Mendes said. “Mount Tom is probably one of the hardest launches in the U.S. because you have no room for error.”

Just like that, the right time came. Mendes brought his wing up, stabilized his footing, then took off. Several times, other pilots would attempt to do the same thing but the breeze wouldn’t be strong enough to fill the wing, and it would slowly deflate down to the ground. When that happened, the pilots simply needed to reset and try again.

John is a certified tandem pilot under the USHPA, a membership-based organization that promotes flying. The USHPA follows rules set by the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates paragliding under the ultralight aircraft category. John checked our gear, including the harnesses and lines, multiple times before takeoff.

More pilots continued to prepare for takeoff, while others were just arriving, such as Peter Williams of Easthampton, who arrived ready to fly sporting red shoes and jean shorts. While the dozen pilots who flew Friday had their differences, they all had one thing in common: They love to fly.

“If you take to it, it just becomes a passion,” said Williams, who started flying in the late 1990s in Maine. “We like to talk about it, like to share the joy and the passion.”

A community of pilots

While Williams was local, some of the pilots on this day were born in countries as far as Brazil, such as Uziel DeSouza from Brazil and Stephen Pfammatter from Switzerland.

“I heard you guys were teaching paragliding?” Pfammatter said with a laugh upon arrival.

Pfammatter has been paragliding since the late 1980s and lives on Cape Cod, where both he and John go paragliding on the beaches. John noted that pilots can launch from everything from small sand dunes to peaks much taller than Mount Tom.

“A friend of mine was the one who got me into this thing. Now I’m addicted,” DeSouza said.

Each flyer had a different story about their first flight, but each followed a similar theme: it all started with an introduction from a single friend. Once hooked, many of the pilots attended specialized paragliding schools to master the sport.

As John continued to say throughout the day, if you start, “you’ll get addicted.”

“That’s the problem,” Williams chuckled. “You’re always looking at the sky.”

Former 22News Anchor Barry Kriger was also preparing for flight, when I told him that I would be flying with John. “Lucky you, brother,” he said.

“It’s the one place where you’re truly in the moment,” Kriger said. “Somebody else wrote this, but it’s true: It [paragliding] is a tremendous personal expression of freedom, and in the moment, you’re not thinking about anything else.”

He looked back at his first time paragliding in the early 2000s. For him, it all started when one of his former producers showed him videos of people flying. “I said, ‘Holy shit, I got to do this. Give me someone’s phone number, I need to call someone,'” Kriger recalled.

“He gave me that guy’s phone number,” he said with a smirk while pointing at John.

Kriger and Mendes are just two of many pilots who got their paragliding start with John. Mendes has only been flying since 2019 and called John the “OG” (original).

Why does John do it? Even though he encourages people not to start flying because they’ll get addicted, he said sharing the experience is one of his greatest joys.

“You sort of just forget about life for a while up here,” John said during our flight.

Pilots can land, if they’re moving slowly enough, right on their feet, or they can land on their bottoms, which John and I did. Certain harnesses include an airbag on the bottom that make for a smooth landing. We slowly circled down to the field right below Mount Tom, and just as John said, we slowly slid into home.

While I can’t say I’m addicted after my first flight, I can’t help but try to spot our launch point each time I pass the mountain, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

To learn more about paragliding, visit the U.S. Hang Gliding & Paragliding Association website, ushpa.org.