This piece is aimed at beginning paramotor pilots who have yet to leave the ground or who, like me, have done only a handful of flights.

Nobody will deny that your first flight is a special one. Unlike on most other kinds of vehicle, your first paramotor trip is likely to be your 'first solo'. You may have an instructor on the radio, but there is no-one next to you with a back-up set of controls and no-one smiling reassuringly from the other side of a flight-simulation rig. This is for real, from the start. And you will not quickly forget the mixture of terror and exhilaration as you hit full power for the first time and after a flurry of noise and motion suddenly find yourself looking down over the tips of your boots through 500 vertical feet of air. My first reaction was combined elation and incredulity: "It works!".

After all the arduous technicalities of ground-handling, the anxiety of the pre-flight checks, the deserved bollockings from your instructor ? suddenly it all comes together and it?s just you and the sky. A nervous glance up at the wing reminds you that you?re in full control of this bit of cloth and back-mounted propeller; what?s more, you?re still ascending. "Leonardo was right about those cambered surfaces! I am not dropping out of the sky?"

Another special moment is the first cross-country, when you head from A to B instead of circling above a field: the new sense of groundspeed, the excitement of the navigation, the challenge of landing ?out?. But another landmark, and for me an unexpected one, is your first flight in a group. If you?re the kind of person who likes to be confident that they have things absolutely sussed before they start parading in front of others, you?ll be especially apprehensive about getting up in the air with a load of other guys under their respective bits of cloth and lawn-mower engines. Flying on your own may have its risks, but at least the pressure is off, and you don?t feel too silly as you nervously complete your seventeenth set of pre-flight checks. It was with some trepidation, then, that I followed up suggestions on the admirable www.paramotorsuk.co.uk Web Site to get sociable. Were they going to laugh at me? Would they all be much better than me? What about mid-air collisions? Turbulence? Peer-pressure to take risks?

But let me tell you: all these concerns evaporate when you get up there and find yourself one of seven or eight spectacularly coloured wings swooping and swirling above the stubble fields as the sun begins to set. It gives you a new awareness of the space around you as you share the air with a group of like-minded enthusiasts, identifying them by the colour of their canopies and watching them from above, from below, from the side, as they climb out or tack crosswind or glide down for a low pass. You become aware of the patterns they are forming and begin to see yourself as part of the pattern, endowed with a new sense of colour, speed and distance in relation to your fellow-flyers, all inhabiting the same airspace but making different uses of it. The communal flying is mainly in circuits between 200 and 400 feet, but occasionally someone will pop up for a lofty vantage at 600 feet or so to watch the activity underneath, or perhaps drop out of the band to do some exercises near the ground. It is indescribably exhilarating and beautiful. I didn?t want to land. My advice to all you lone solo flyers: get social.

And I haven?t even bought a radio yet. Another ?first? in store?

Kevin Taylor