“Gather around, everyone,” Steve Saint says. “Let’s say a prayer about these flights.” Saint, a thin, gray-bearded 58-year-old, is wearing khakis and a salmon-colored shirt and holding a red crash helmet with a radio headset. He is standing with a dozen employees and well-wishers in front of a candy-apple-red vehicle parked beside a crumbling strip of tarmac at a sleepy little airstrip near Dunnellon, Fla., 87 miles northwest of Orlando. The contraption looks like a dune buggy, but one with a propeller in back like an Everglades airboat and, billowing above, a rainbow-colored flex wing—essentially a double-canopy parachute—held aloft on a mast.
“Jay, how about you?” Saint says, peering through wire-rimmed glasses. “You built this thing. You know what can go wrong.” Jay Dyck, the project’s chief designer, steps forward, closes his eyes and drops his chin. “Father and God,” he booms, warming to his task, “we have tried to do our best.” A prop plane buzzes into the blue Florida sky behind him. “Father, we leave it to you. Help Steve stay alert and be safe.” His entreaty done, Dyck scrutinizes the driveshaft and chute lines one last time. “You can design something on paper, but it’s just a thing until you get it in the air,” he tells me, his animated face growing sober. “If something goes wrong up there, you can’t park it. You’re gonna come down.”
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