30 Jan Who invented the paraglider?

The honest answer is that paragliding had no single inventor, but it does have a founding flight, a date and a village. June 1978, Mieussy, in the Haute-Savoie region of France, and three friends, Jean-Claude Bétemps, André Bohn and Gérard Bosson.

The Mieussy flight, June 1978

The three walked up to the Pointe du Pertuiset carrying ram-air parachutes, the square canopies sport skydivers were already using. The idea was to run off the slope and take off instead of jumping from an aircraft. Bétemps went first. Bohn made the long flight, gliding down to the football pitch in the valley a thousand metres below.

That is the difference between the first paragliding flight and an ordinary parachute descent. Nobody jumped. Somebody took off on foot from a slope.

Why the invention is often dated to 1965

Because 1965 is a real date, just from a different story. In September that year the American engineer David Barish was running down the slopes of Hunter Mountain, in New York State, under a single-surface wing he had designed to recover space capsules. He called it slope soaring and tried to sell it to ski resorts as a summer activity. It never caught on.

Earlier still, in 1963, the Canadian engineer Domina Jalbert patented the parafoil, the ram-air canopy that inflates through its open leading edge. Without that component there is no modern paraglider. But a parafoil is not a paraglider, any more than an engine is a car.

Who named it

The word parapente is French and came from the same place as the activity, built from parachute and pente, the slope you launch from, an origin covered in more detail in the article on where the name comes from. The English word paragliding arrived seven years later, in 1985, when Patrick Gilligan and Bertrand Dubuis published the first manual of the discipline.

From 1978 to now

What followed was not the work of an inventor but of many manufacturers correcting the equipment year after year. Wings stopped being adapted parachutes and started being designed to fly, with more cells, higher aspect ratio and certification tests of their own. Harness, helmet and reserve parachute became purpose-built kit.

That history is why a tandem flight in Tenerife needs no previous experience today. The passenger flies with a pilot and with certified equipment, two things that did not exist in 1978.