The fascination with flying starts early, maybe as a toddler watching a bird float by or seeing Superman soar across the television screen. By the time 10 or 11 rolls around, you find yourself looking at the roof, thinking "I can do that."

For some, the pursuit of flight never ends — the rush fulfilled by jumping from planes wearing parachutes and leaping from cliffs with paragliders. For the rest of us, the thud on the front lawn was enough to keep us from taking flight again.

But now there's a way to experience the freedom of flight without leaping from high places. It's called indoor skydiving.

Essentially, it's floating on a column of high-speed air inside a tube-like chamber and it's about as close to flying as you'll get.

"It's exactly the same feeling without the adrenaline of jumping out of a plane," says Laura Lewis, a manager at SkyVenture Colorado. "It's a different kind of adrenaline rush because you're not scared."

Well, maybe she's not scared. The rest of had a little bit of the butterflies, thanks in part to sign behind the counter that said SkyVenture couldn't be held responsible for any injuries or deaths.

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It didn't help that during the training session, which lasted about 15 minutes, instructor Rick Rezek asked if anyone had neck or shoulder problems, or previous shoulder separations. One person in the group (there were four of us) had separated his shoulder twice, so Rick asked him to hang back in the little classroom. We never saw the guy again.

That left me, along with Victor Quintanilla and Brandi Mergenthaler, who had decided to try indoor skydiving together. I'm still not sure which one of us enjoyed it the most.

In a word, Quintanilla said, "It was awesome."

SkyVenture (http://www.skyventure.com ) started in Orlando in 1998, when original owner Bill Kitchen decided to create a place where skydivers could train and other people could get the sensation of skydiving without jumping. The company, now owned by a group of investors, has since expanded to Arizona, California, Colorado, New Hampshire, England and Malaysia, with plans for several more in the next few years, including one currently being built in Moscow.

It wasn't a new technology — wind tunnels have been around since the late 1800s and there were already skydiving tunnels on the market — but Kitchen wanted something that was safer than previous versions.

What he did was create a 40-foot tower that's shaped like an hourglass, with a large air tank at the bottom, a narrow flying chamber and an expanded area at the top, where large fans suck the air upward. The air underneath gets compressed once it reaches the chamber and the fans help create a vacuum known as the Venturi effect, similar to the way a carburetor gets gas into a car's intake.

The system creates smoother air in the chamber than the old way and a wall-to-wall airflow eliminates the possibility of falling off the column of air. There are nets at the bottom and top of the chamber, but it's impossible to reach the top because the air disperses as the upper chamber expands.

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Basically, what all this means is that indoor skydiving rocks.

Just imagine floating on a stream of air cranking anywhere from 70 to 140 mph (depending on your weight and skill level) in a glass tube as your face rumples up like Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase in "Spies Like Us."

"It was a blast, but I think I'd have to do it a little bit longer to get over the nervousness and relax in there," said Mergenthaler, 21.

That's the thing about skydiving, inside or out: it's not as easy as it looks.

During the training session, which includes a five-minute video, you're taught the proper posture: back arched, arms above your head and legs slightly bent. It seems easy, but once you get into the chamber, there are so many fluctuations.

Tuck your head slightly or flatten your body out and you'll start climbing into the chamber. Tilt your hands or legs one way or the other and you'll start spinning. Arch your back too much and you'll start falling.

At times, we bounced around like a kernel in an air popper. Thankfully, Rezek was there when we got squirrely.

"It's unbelievable how many variables there are," he said. "You just have to do it over and over to get a feel for it."

First-timers get a training session, rental equipment — suit, elbow and knee pads, helmet, goggles, earplugs — and a pair of two-minute flights for $48. Return trips cost $14 a minute, which is about half the regular price.

Thing is, they could charge $100 a minute and it'd be worth it.

"It was really fun," said Quintanilla, 22. "I'm definitely coming back."

Me too.

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John Marshall is asap's sports writer, based in Denver.

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