Paragliding was invented forty kilometres from this valley. In June 1978, three men ran off the slopes above Mieussy in Haute-Savoie under modified square parachutes and stayed in the air long enough to prove the idea. The sport took a French name — parapente, a contraction of parachute de pente, slope parachute — and, within a decade, a natural capital. Any Chamonix Paragliding School operating today inherits both that lineage and the terrain that made it inevitable. The town below is small: Chamonix-Mont-Blanc counts roughly 8,900 permanent residents and absorbs several million visitors a year. It hosted the first Winter Olympics in 1924, and its reputation as an alpinism laboratory dates to 1786, when Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard first stood on the summit of Mont Blanc. Free-flight instruction sits inside that tradition rather than alongside it. Pilots hold licences issued through the Fédération Française de Vol Libre, canopies are inspected on an annual cycle, and every launch is a reading of wind gradient, cloud base and slope aspect. Chamonix Paragliding School tickets are, in that sense, tickets to a discipline with paperwork behind it. The valley itself does much of the teaching. Planpraz, at 2,000 metres, faces south-east across the Mont Blanc massif and warms early, generating dependable thermals from mid-morning onward. Le Brévent rises 525 metres higher, at 2,525 metres, and gives a longer glide, with the Aiguille du Midi standing at 3,842 metres directly opposite and the Bossons glacier spilling below it. Landing fields lie near the Arve at roughly 1,035 metres, a vertical separation of nearly 1,500 metres. Écoles de parapente in the Chamonix valley are distinguished less by equipment — the wings are broadly similar — than by which launch site a pilot reads best on a given morning. The Aiguilles Rouges on the northern flank produce different air from the glaciated southern wall, and a pilot who has flown here for twenty seasons knows which slope will hold lift at eleven o'clock in August and which will have gone flat. That accumulated reading is the real inventory. Tandem passengers arrive expecting a view of Mont Blanc at 4,806 metres and leave having been shown a working system: rising columns of warm air over south-facing scree, the sink over cold glacier ice, the reliable evening calm as the valley exhales downhill. The instruction offices sit on the valley floor — one at 11 Avenue du Savoy, open 08:00–19:00 every day of the week — while the flying happens a thousand metres above them. Chamonix Paragliding School tours have, in the nearly fifty years since Mieussy, turned an act of controlled falling into something closer to a local literacy.