Buchenberg – Allgäu, Germany

MY MOMENT

One small step in life. One great step in flight.

Buchenberg is where I earned my paragliding licence. Before that, I had practised only on small slopes. Facing my first flight with a height difference of three or four hundred metres, I was nervous, and my legs began taking tiny, hesitant steps almost on their own. I still remember so clearly that moment just before stepping from the hillside into the air.

Then I took the step. The ground fell away beneath my feet, but the wing held me up. Alongside the nerves came a feeling I had never known quite like this: I really could fly. From the ground, it might have looked like one small step. In my life as a paraglider pilot, it was a very big one.

After the examination, I received my German DHV paragliding licence and attained IPPI level 4. The person flying down from Buchenberg that day—a little awkward, a little nervous—was beginning to become a paraglider pilot.