This is the story of Terry and Maria Jose Bono– how they learned to paraglide, fell in love, and married in the skies above Little Gap near the Blue Mountain Ski Resort in Carbon County, Pennsylvania.

 

Gliders In The Sky

While hiking the Appalachian Trail as a 14-year-old Boy Scout, Terry Bono of Nesquehoning remembers hearing voices coming above the tree canopy and wondered where they were coming from. 

At the crest of the mountain, a rock outcropping, known as Kirk Ridge, unfolded the canopy unveiling an expansive green valley, an endless blue sky, and half a dozen colorful soaring hang gliders. Bono knew that some day, he too would fly. 

Fast-forward 15 years and now, Terry is president of the Water Gap Hang Gliding Club. He forwent the hang glider and instead chose the paraglider – a rectangular foil designed parachute that flies in rising air currents and the paramotor – a paraglider with a rear mounted motorized propeller. 

“I always wanted to fly, so I went online and bought a paramotor,” said Terry. “The paramotor weighs 44 lbs. and is super lightweight. You can take off from the ground and it’s fun to fly.”

With a month’s experience at paramotoring, he wanted to do some real flying and when he re-met the Kirk Ridge flyers, Terry saw his opportunity to make the change to paragliding. 

“I like paragliding more because there is no motor,” Terry explained. “It’s soaring, it’s skill. You are thinking about what birds are thinking about. A guy in Costa Rica said it best. He said that paramotoring is the wrong note.”

The Costa Rican Connection

That brings us to Terry’s life changing trip to Costa Rica. One of his paragliding buddies, Fred Grotenhuis of New Jersey invited him for a winter’s paragliding vacation to the Central American country.

Sixtyish Grotenhuis had made several previous visits to Costa Rica and had hooked up with a small group of local paragliders. The Vietnam vet’s skill and age prompted the local paragliders to call him grandpa ninja. One of the local pilots was Maria.

“The year before, grandpa ninja had come with a friend who was also sixty,“ said Maria with a sweet Spanish accent. “I pictured him returning with two other old guys as he entered my apartment to see some videos we had taking of last weeks flying.”

“And this really handsome guy comes into my apartment,” said Maria. “And I said whoa! That’s how we met.”

They went to Turrubares, an inland mountain site or cross-country site and later, headed for Caldera—a ridge site overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the ocean air current is smooth and at just the right speed. It is known as a super location and a great place to learn. They flew all day.

“We talked and we did a little flirting,” said Maria. Terry left Costa Rica only to return two weeks later – purportedly to introduce a friend to the joys of Costa Rican paragliding. This trip, Terry and Maria hit it off big.

A Fledgling Flight

Maria likewise, wanted to fly since she was a kid. At the fledgling age of four, she saw herself flying like a bird and flapped her arms up as if they were wings as she dove from the edge of an empty swimming pool. Although she landed headfirst and gashed her forehead, Maria still wanted to fly. She simply realized that she would need some training.

It took another seven years until Maria, at 13 visited an uncle who hang-glided in Miami. Maria coaxed a tandem ride with her uncle’s instructor on a hang glider launched by a motorboat. When the hang glider was fully airborne, the instructor released the tether “It was amazing. I have a photo that shows how happy I was when we were launching.”

In 2000, Maria visited friends in Chile; one of them suggested paragliding. “I didn’t know what it was.” Said Maria.

“It’s like a parachute but you jump from the edge of a mountains,” he said. “It’s not jumping out of a plane.”

Maria questioned, “Do I fly?” 

He said, “Yes.” 

Maria said, “Let’s go” and she never looked back. 

Both Maria and Terry had recognized that the sport that they both loved was hard on a relationship with a non-paraglider pilot 

“One of the problems with pilots is once you get into the sport, you realize how great it is and if your wife doesn’t want to do it, it causes a lot of problems because you can only fly when it is good,” Terry explained. “It’s nice to have someone who gets excited about flying and wants to go with you at the same time. People who play together, stay together.”

They got excited about flying and about each other. Maria planed a three-week visit with Terry in Nesquehoning. Two and a half months later, they felt “this is working” and she returned to Costa Rica, just long enough to give up her apartment, sell her furnishings and catch a return flight.

Shortly after arriving back in Carbon County, Terry took Maria for a hike to Glen Onoko Falls and proposed.

A Fly-In Wedding

Terry and Maria planned a fly-in wedding and set the date two months in advance.

“They said, ‘This is the day and you guys are all going to fly into our wedding,’” said guest and fellow pilot Bill Watters of Hackettstown N.J. “We told them they were crazy because we can’t pick a day one day in advance—much less two months in advance.”

Things weren’t promising when the forecast for the Sept. 26, 2004 wedding flight wasn’t good. “But it turned out to be the most beautiful day that whole month of September,” said Watters.

As sixty guests sat in the Little Gap landing zone, with music playing, fifteen pilots launched from the mountain. “The conditions on launch were absolutely perfect,” remembers Terry. “The pilots and the updraft took them 2,000 feet above the mountaintop. We had to be at our reception at a certain time otherwise no one would have come down.”

The first pilot descended wide of the mark, crashing through several rows of unoccupied chairs—just missing his girlfriend. The remaining landings were far less colorful. Even the Pastor, David Tietie, a non-pilot, rode to the event as a passenger on a tandem hang glider with Thad Miller as a pilot.

Everyone exchanged their jumpsuits for wedding regalia. Terry, Maria and the Pastor climbed into a waiting hot air balloon. It was released and rose twenty feet to the end of its tether.

They married in the balloon and as it was sealed with a kiss, the guests released helium-filled balloons with wishes for the newlyweds.

Then a rainbow appeared. Terry’s brother had cancer and died last year. “My mom saw the rainbow and said it was a sign from Tommy—that he’s here,” Terry said. “I never felt like that before. I even got a little choked up. It was quite a day.”