On a Wing and a Dare : Recreation: For the adventurous, ParaPlanes--half-parachute, half-Go Kart--can set spirits to soaring.

If ever a contraption seemed expressly designed for the song, “Into the Air, Junior Bird Men” (unofficial anthem, complete with stupid gestures, of Air Force cadets), it is the ParaPlane.

After all, this is an aircraft that starts like a lawn mower. It steers like a sled. And costs as much as a Hyundai.

When it takes off, this utterly homemade-looking flying machine resembles an egg beater whirring through the sky--supported, in case both its engines fail, by the lofty neon rainbow of an ultra-pricey parachute.

As flight instructor John Hall reminds a first-time pilot just before lift off: “The parachute is a $3,000 item. The engine is a $300 item. If you need to make a choice between losing the engine or the parachute, you lose the engine.”

Nearly every Sunday morning, Hall, an aerospace technician who has worked with astronauts on improving Space Shuttle functions, is out in the gentle hills of the Santa Ynez Valley teaching thrill seekers how to soar in ParaPlanes. He also preps them in case sudden winds turn their trips into Z-ticket rides and they shake, rattle, roll, careen and bounce all over the place.

Half-parachute, half-Go Kart, the ParaPlane is technically considered an ultra-light aircraft. But although some ultra-lights require a pilot’s license, the ParaPlane does not.

There are only two controls on ParaPlanes: a throttle governing the twin engines and the steering levers, which are manipulated by the feet. Ground school from ParaPlane dealer/instructors like Hall lasts all of about 90 minutes, with cautions like this:

“Never take your hand off the throttle (protruding from under the driver’s seat). If you do, you’ll lose it, and you’ll be panicking. We don’t want you to do that. This is supposed to be fun. . . . Don’t worry if you don’t remember which way to turn, I’ll be telling you what to do on the radio (built into the pilot’s crash helmet).”

Once the engines are fired up (by yanking their starter cords), two propellers produce enough air to fill the canopy-style parachute behind the ParaPlane. The ParaPlane won’t fly without the parachute, which, when inflated, acts as the aircraft’s wing.

Next, the throttle is opened fully. Within a few seconds, the cart picks up ground speed and swiftly takes off.

Suddenly, the pilot is airborne, cruising above vineyards and freeways, cow pastures and parking lots. Every outing, even the first one, is a solo flight: ParaPlanes seat only one.

Despite their goofy Rube Goldbergesque appearance, these devices are capable of reaching altitudes of several thousand feet. “You can go up 10,000 feet, but you’ll run out of oxygen before you run out of ParaPlane,” says Hall.

Priced from $6,150 to $8,500, the aircraft is small enough to be broken down and stored in a car trunk, then whipped out for flying virtually anywhere. Under FAA regulations, ParaPlanes are legal as long as they’re not flown in air-traffic control areas (near airports) and not flown in a manner that creates a hazard to other people or property.

Hall says one of his favorite places to fly his ParaPlane is at a nearby deserted beach, where he sails about 3 1/2 feet off the ground. The height is perfect for chasing birds, he says, “but they’re a lot quicker than I am.”

You can’t plan on shaving time off that morning commute with one of these hedge-hoppers. Top ParaPlane speed--actually, its only speed--is pure slow lane: 26 m.p.h. Or as Hall puts it: “The neat thing about these things is that you’re only going 26 m.p.h. You’d have to do a lot of things wrong to kill yourself.”

Scaring yourself, however, is commonplace and, apparently, part of the attraction. Consider, for instance, the experience of Larry Hudson, a jovial Honolulu taxicab driver who flew one of Hall’s ParaPlanes on a recent weekend in Santa Ynez. Near the end of his first flight, Hudson barely cleared a fence, landing considerably off-target with the aircraft’s parachute tangled in a bunch of grape vines.

“It was what they call an unscheduled landing,” joked the cabbie, who was not hurt. He purchased a ParaPlane after a second flight, vastly improved, the next day.

But even then, Hudson was both shaking and exhilarated, declaring after his second touch-down: “It’s scary. No doubt about it. It’s like a roller coaster. I was rockin’ and rollin’ out there. It’s OK when you go up, but when you’re coming down, you feel like a rock.”

Hudson had known about and saved for a ParaPlane for several years. The aircraft were introduced in 1983 at a Florida air show but remain relatively unknown, especially on the West Coast.

According to ParaPlane co-designer Dan Thompson, fewer that 4,000 ParaPlanes have been sold worldwide. He attributes the relatively small number to lack of advertising, not lack of safety.

Hall, who operates the Santa Barbara-based Coastal Flight dealership with his wife, Leanne, points out that nobody’s been hurt in their classes, which they began offering last June. He says the worst accident he has witnessed involved a ParaPlane that landed in a ditch and lost a wheel. The pilot was unhurt.

All it takes to learn to fly from Hall is $165; applicants must qualify within the maximum weight (230 pounds) and minimum age (16) limits. Then they must sign a sobering liability waiver that implies they could be dealing with the Addams Family:

“I understand and acknowledge that powered parachute flight activities have inherent dangers that no amount of care, caution, instruction and expertise can eliminate, and I expressly and voluntarily assume all risk of death or personal injury sustained while participating in a powered parachute flight activity. . . .”

The waiver demands that ParaPlane students declare they are financially able to support their potential heirs or abandoned dependents in the style to which they are accustomed.

Despite such dire warnings, ParaPlanes have acquired a laudable safety record, says Ben Owen of the Experimental Aircraft Assn. in Oshkosh, Wis.

“The ParaPlane is one of the few aircraft in the ultra-light category that can be insured,” he adds. “It has a pretty remarkable safety record for a device that travels in three directions. Unless you get a high wind you’re operating into, it should be almost fail-safe.

“I haven’t heard of anybody who didn’t like the ParaPlane. . . . I think, overall, it’s a good sporting option for people who don’t want to go to the extreme of getting a license to fly an ultra-light or any other type of airplane.”

Compared to the ParaPlane, Owen says, other ultra-light planes have had terrible safety records. (The FAA defines an ultra-light aircraft as one that weighs less than 254 pounds and has a fuel capacity of less than five gallons, among other things.)

“The first time around (with typical ultra-lights) wasn’t so good. Manufacturers were looking for quick profits and didn’t spend the time they needed on them,” Owen explains.

“There were about 60 deaths per year (on ultra-lights that were not ParaPlanes) about seven years ago,” he said. “Now we don’t have a half a dozen per year. It’s really gotten under control.” (Neither the FAA nor the National Transportation Safety Board maintains safety records on the ParaPlane.)

Owen knows of no injuries that have resulted from ParaPlane use, but his Experimental Aircraft Assn. has attributed one death to the aircraft. It’s an attribution that ParaPlane co-designer Thompson claims is unfair.

“A gentleman did succumb back in late 1984,” Thompson recalled in a phone interview from the ParaPlane Corp. headquarters in Pennsauken, N.J.

“He actually took off, made the first two turns of a normal pattern. Then he went straight, hit the tops of trees and tumbled into the water. There was no autopsy performed even though the family thought he died of a heart attack. It would seem he did since he followed the first part of the flight pattern and then just went straight.”

As for why ParaPlanes have been especially slow to catch on the West Coast, Thompson says: “Everybody thinks the West Coast sets the trends, and in many cases they do. But most of our dealers are on the East Coast.”

ParaPlane inventor Steve Snyder, 55, suspects that the high value of California land also may have something to do with the greater popularity of ParaPlanes in the East.

“Getting a place to fly and to teach people to fly in California is not that easy. Land owners don’t want to take a chance on it,” he says. “Even though we know it’s safe, they don’t. Now a few (West Coast) dealers have gotten places to fly, and it’s starting to open up.”

There are now eight dealerships/flight schools--including Hall’s--in California, although not not all of them are in operation. ParaPlanes are sold in many parts of the world, including Australia, Paraguay, France, England, Germany, Spain and Japan.

Snyder, an aeronautical engineer/inventor who also holds the patents on the square parachute, began developing the ParaPlane in the mid-1970s. He recalls that the device started as a gliding parachute that could be flown without a person, but with a video camera by remote control.

“In ‘78-’79, the ultra-light business got big in the United States,” he recalls. “We didn’t want to produce another ultra-light, so we made a powered parachute big enough to carry a person and really set a new category of recreational flying.”

With time, Snyder expects that most people who learn to fly will do so in ParaPlanes rather than in light planes like Cessnas or Pipers.

“People feel comfortable in ParaPlanes,” he reasons. “You’ve got two engines, not one. If one engine fails, you can still fly it around and hardly notice the difference. If both fail, you’ve got a parachute, one that comes down at half the sinking speed of a conventional parachute.

“You could be up in the air, get up some altitude, then if you were panicked, you could shut off both engines, close your eyes, grit your teeth and be sent to the ground. When you hit, you could unbuckle and walk away and be OK. Obviously, we don’t recommend that.”

Not even, it appears, for the Air Force’s junior birdmen.