“At the time, we were thought to be a bit like aliens!”

We regularly see them in the summer, these little colored dots in the sky. Paragliders especially, but also hang gliders sometimes, escape into the Jura airs. If the practice of such disciplines is common today, there were still rare daredevils who dared to take on this challenge around fifty years ago.
Pierre Liechti remembers it very well. While the Jura Free Flight Club celebrated its half-century of existence on Saturday October 5, he who was one of the founders and the first president remembers with emotion the beginnings of these aerial devices in the region. He specifies: “At the time, it was not the Jura Free Flight Club, but the Jura Delta Club. There were no paragliders here yet.”
The beginnings in Moutier
Child of Moutier, mechanic at the head of a polyester company, Pierre Liechti was in his thirties in the 1970s. “I was behind my TV and I saw a report on people from Valais who were flying thanks to a canvas and tubes I had already heard about it elsewhere, but I didn’t know it existed in Switzerland.”
Without a second thought, the Prévôtois jumps out of his chair and calls the TSR in Geneva to get the number of these flying men. Without hesitation, he ordered a delta wing for them. “As soon as she arrived, a friend and I spent the night riding her.” The next day, he tried it in a field on the heights of Moutier. “I flew a few meters,” says this enthusiast, his tone cheerful. “It was an incredible feeling. To feel your feet leaving the ground is something crazy!”
Autographs
Driven by the desire to fly since he was a child, Pierre Liechti was already a glider pilot at the time. An asset that allowed him to get by and quickly learn how to handle this machine, which is still unknown in the region. If he remembers that others also started the delta on the side of the Saint-Imier valley, he indicates that he was the first in the region of Moutier and Delémont.
In the Jura, the sauce took very quickly. “At the beginning, it was only the weirdos who did this kind of stuff. People took us for extraterrestrials, but were happy to see us. I even signed autographs during a demonstration in Boécourt!” laughs our interlocutor.