an intresting mission!!

this is a story about what we want, or our toys, or kites as the subject is.what we love and what we dont.

as we all know kites are as much about a feel as they are a curiosity,maby to some just a power source or a plant to have fun with, but i think its always more than that.somehow they facinate us, "how it flys",
as any accent or lingo is to a language.we all get to know our kite, and we love it for that.
every kite is different and anybody who has flown a few different kites and felt them will understand this.
so the intresting question is could anyone actualy define what they want from a kite manufacturer?
how many of us understand how a kite really flys? do we know why it responds the way it does?
do we even know a kite has a feel?
if you were given a kite would you know if it was awsome or if it was shit without any leads?
it would come down to if it exited you,or fustrated you,or scared you or plain bored you...where is the envalope?
thats a really intresting question i think...and it comes with expirience and a bit of thought.
if you love your kite because you can go out an have an awsome session with it and you wouldnt want to let it go, think why is that..??
its not just a kite, somebody made it fly the way it does.

..what is it about that kite?

ill go first...its a foil, its small..it requires no less than a hand span of input from the wrist each way to make it loop and it stops dead if your clumsy on the breaks..it turns before its axis started.its light, its not in any way fiendly and sometimes it maks me giggle enuff that i have to stop.
does anybody have any idea why this kite can do this??

do you know why you love you kite?

N-GEN, thats one crazy kite, so old and good

I flew Perrin's vapor on the weekend , and some how it made me think this is a modern day N-gen

Ok, my turn , It turns super quick and is very stable + has pulleys in the bridles

for me its a different type of kite for different occasions.

what gives me biggest grin is insane glide. not pop or lift but glide. i like long and low gliding.

for speed runs i want some thing fast that can handle a good down wind angle that is stable with good depower.

for storms i want something that wont punish the bajesus out of me when those squalls come through.

luckily i have glorious kites that perform those tasks.

what i would like in the future is a MASSIVE kite that pulls like a 16 year old school boy and 10 sherman tanks combined for almost no wind cruizing.

That fine line between fear and exhilaration. Knowing you can trust and control your equipment at all times but that it has the capability to annihilate you when you’re not concentrating on what you’re doing.

11m SLE, now 3 years old. Been over 80kph on water and would do more if the wind presented itself. Jumped higher than what I wanted to(when I've actually had the balls enough to hook it) and had to top loop it to slow the way down. Yet I could spend a whole day riding surf style in waist to head high till my feet bleed.

Buggy kite? I really like my 7m Haka. I would like my 12m Yak more if I got to use it more often. New respect for my 2.7m Speed when it behaved in extreme conditions where I thought it would spank me otherwise(at least till I exceeded the load rating with my Moosetruck+arse :o)

Would that be the 17m Yak or a 15m Manta eh Plummet?

or a 15m deluxe cloth flysurfer speed3.... but can't see me laying my hands on one of those anytime soon.

i'm not feeling the glory of the edge..... it has oodles of lift and float but the glide is lacking i still prefer my manta. maybe thats because i've been flying it for 2 years and have my technique dialed for foil and not lei?

Ooooh yes, I forgot that one. But pricey unless you lucky to score one off a tourist making a sale on Trademe.

Little different but definitely more aggressive and more wind... maybe not as floaty but a quick view from the penthouse suite. To float you have to learn to top loop which is unnerving at first or more wind.

i like a 4 line foil kite that switches off when not on the breaks and is stable enough i dont need to always keep an eye on it. I like a kite that just keeps on accelerating and doesnt jerk me sideways in a gust, it pulls me forward. I want a kite with low lift so if i sky it i maybe go up by 1 foot. i like a kite that points super high but doesnt luff when the breaks are off. i want it to be pretty fast.

I got the chance to ask for all this recently to a kite maker and they either built it that way or we were thinking the same things anyhow... either way i got what i wanted

couldnt be happier

i think guster i'm still coming to grips with getting air on the water too. the exit technique is different and you loose speed alot faster. i have gotten bigger air on the water and probably more distance too but its more urgent less relaxed.

i love the hauling at 40+ clicks on the land scoping the manta to just a smidge past the zenith doing a slow re-direct, if i time it right the kite just turns in the direction i'm going and stays there above my head park and ride style, i then glide effortlessly in complete control. when i'm coming into land i re-direct harder for a pillowy soft landing.

its sort of seamless and magic glide off the earth, glide along, glide back down..... for me that is the holey grail.

Yeah water lets you lock the power in till you choose to release it. Hook it, hold it and load it till it gets through about 75degrees, release and pop, redirect or top-loop, line it up down wind as the kite gets low redirect again and gently touch down. Yes... it is more agressive.

Though you can do the glidey bit but I guess you don't get much flat water there. The 17m I have my eye on does oodles of glide with surprising height. My current 16m just glides... no height but I do have more fun than most with it on my Scimitar. I remember a day when it was just me on the water chasing Jimmy22 on the land.

yeah no flat water here. chop or waves. the best time for air is fanging off a wave lip. but thats my bad side with the prevailing wind direction. it will come in time..... mixing sessions between land and water also means i'm probably progressing slower than i could if i dedicated to full water. .... that thats note going to happen. when sit back at night and dream about epic adventures its always about what sort of landboarding downwinder i can do or how i can manage the 24hr etc. i think ultimatly the water will remain as something i do because the tide is in or the wind direction is wrong for an epic land session.

tho carving up waves is pretty cool.

You are so right Al. Kiting is all about feel. That why I am not so worried about going fast anymore. Even when there is no speed there is always plenty of power and that power is what I go back for.

I like a big wind range and and something you don't have to look at much. Something you can ride with in the dark and know what its doing just from the touch of the handles.

For me coming form the early days of kiting where the kite had a tendacey to get wing tip tuck especially going upwind, I love the stability in the modern kites and of course stability means you spend more time looking in your direction of travel rather than the kite. I am also a fan of fast kites with smooth acceleration and predictable kites with low lift and tend to go for the high performance fixed bridle kites without been race kites like the Reactors, Reactor II and the Blurr in medium to low winds. In high winds i like the low ratio low lift kites like the Rage or Viper these kites are more forgiving when you get pulled out of position than the high performance kites.

see, this is what i mean.....between you (skypirate) and mozwaa fat old wimp their is a huge history of kites that i missed out on but would love to know.
i have flown a fair few kites but nothing compared to you guys, nothing compared to perrin and im positve as the kites get better (more stable,betterupwind,faster) people will forget what it was to be challanged by a kite,i thought that was half the fun.. an i realise im saying this as a positive newby to the sport compared to you guys but i had a lot of fun thinking about why my kite kept luffing,crashing,folding blablabla....
does this mean, with all the awsome modern kites that anybody can pickup and fly...all that pilot skill base is lost because the kite is so forgiving?

"does this mean, with all the awsome modern kites that anybody can pickup and fly...all that pilot skill base is lost because the kite is so forgiving?"

nope a new forgiving kite will still punish an unskilled pilot.
and the skill base justs shifts to new and more funnerer things.

you can focus more on truely going fast or getting air or hammering that dune. where once the kite was the limiting factor now its you. which is a good thing.

I say god riddance to the slow and the unstable and the luffing old kites and hello to the crazy new bread of beasts.

so as the skill base gears into a more stable kite the quality of the ride and the learnig curve increases but the understanding of why everything happens the way it does actualy decreases and this is what im getting at..
you dont have to fly the kite as much anymore, and this has been the most facinating thing for me..getting to know the kites....probably why i started this thread.
i wonderd if anybody has the same intrest in learnig to fly something that gave you a nose bleed (n-gens)
but then rewarded you heavily when you got to know it and learned how to fly it.

funnerer. That should be in the dictionary.

Most of the old kites had great raw performance and were a pleasure to fly and ride with. Its a real shame that some of the greatest kites are now seen in an historical perspective.
Some of them still go well even if they are not as easy as the new ones.

New kites are very good and getting better all the time. Its just such a shame that elliptical foils have had all the development. There are other shapes from power kiting's short history that worked better at the time than the elliptical foils they flew alongside yet they got passed by.

would that be the c-quad? i have seen what thoes things can do...i tried to fly one and couldnt...
i also tried to pack it up and couldnt do that either
their is definently talent required to fly thoes kites.
one of peterlynns fellas was talking about doing 80kph with a delta, thoes thing are twitchy as hell...i thought he must have been on speed just to keep up with it!!
that is the kind of talent i missed out on, i picked up a foil that i thought was hard to fly when i was a learner and realised it was easy compared to other kites like the c-quad....and that i should stop complaning about it luffing.
i think you learn more when somethings hard, it makes you better in the end and it seems that the old kites did that....
anybody any idea what they were flying as racekites in europe before the PKDz and libres?

C quads are one design that got left behind. Pity really. They came out of the box working so well. It took years for the early foils to get up to pace and the C quads were on it straight away. I would like to fly a C Quad that had 20 years development by 35 different companies. Unfortunately they went out of fasion because people did not like the bag. Odd.

C Quads are not hard to fly. You just have to fly them like C Quads not like foils. Best to put your whole hand under the leader and use lots more wrist and lots less arm than you normally would.

Back to your original theme.

Many power kiters are not enthusiast kite fliers. They are boarders or buggiers. They don't give a damn why anything happens.
You are one of the rare breed who is actually interested.

I love using new kites but I still enjoy the raw power of the old ones. Can you picture that big pink peel that Crafar flies from time to time. It has lightning bolts and clouds on it. That kite is 7.5m 2 lines, no brakes no de power. I owned that kite for a few years and had some hairy moments with it. I have only ever dumped kites 3 times to avoid death and all 3 were with that kite.
To de-power it you point it up and wait. If you want to go somewhere. Turn it around get it going and hang on. Sometimes when it is locked in with oodles of apparent it can be hard to turn and you just have to ride it out or in 3 cases dump it. I rode that all over mooseland and on beaches up and down the west coast. It was great for doing powered up tricks and the longests drifts.

I still carry my little 2.5m 1995 peel with me on my buggy. I had all my biggest crashes with that kite. I had 3 70kph runs in a row with a 77. I rode that all over the place and I love the way it flies. Even in a big wind there is a moderate amount of power unless it is turning. It is such a lovely thing. 5:1 ying yang pattern. Flies fast like a stunt kite. If you want grunt pop a quick loop or figure 8. Work it hard and it will go. Its a bit old and soft now. Its been tuned a couple of times but I don't go out without it even though I usually use my 1.6 c quad instead these days. When I had my big crash It picked me up and threw me on the ground. Put me out of the seat for 18 months. That was the price for all the good times we have had together. Its actually Lorraines kite so I don't always lend it out but I must give you a fly AL. Its just fun even though it is a bit slow by modermn standard.

Back to kite development.
When I first got that 7.5 peel it was the biggest fastest kite around. In a very short time the 5m were going faster than me and then a while after that a 2.5m skytiger roared past me. Those skytigers were another great kite that got left behind. They are still one of the cleanest foils around and they had that odd backflap thing going on. There were a bunch of rectangle foils. Not many left now. Skybums still make one.

Foils these days get all the benefit of proven aerofoil profiles, computer aided design that allows the use a different profile in the tips than in the center or shifting the center of effort across the span for the same shape. There is also a lot of innovation in other areas of soft foil aerodynamics the have come into kiting like d-ribs and variable profile design. Computer design allows for any panel layout to reduce stretch and enhance graphics and once done simply get fed into a plotter/cutter.

I reckon most of the art is in the sewing these days since the design is more a combination of experience, witchcraft and some luck. Not all designs make it into the final yearly model range either and it is down to some demo riders to decide which of the designs the most like. that is why some brands have a white-lable sideline.

C-quads were awesome. Filled a big gap at the time. I learned to kitesurf on them and they were probably less frustrating than earlier depowerable kitesurfing kites. My Naish AR-5(and some I won't mention for fear of pointing and laughing) was much worse. Yet, none of these so called horrible designs ever killed me. At worst a few stitches due to dodgy locations or some really awesome conditions. Mine Saw more moose trips than many kites and seen water, sand and snow. Still holds my fastest buggy speed and might still be a great short coarse kite. They were never challenging and weren't perfect either though.

I knew some Ozzies that only buggied with deltas and some had 10m wingspans. The speedwing was also used by many earlier kiters, often thought to be the inspiration for the c-quad and wasn't that twitchy. I tried to take the C-quad a little further but never had enough time. It was easier to design and build foils instead.

There were many fads and gimmicks over the years too. Will be interesting to see what they'll manage to come up with next. However I know some solid performers will always be hard to beat. Especially when you are comfortable and adept with them.

I am a big fan of those rectangular foils and one of my regrets is not buying a Skytiger when Flexi still made them, went for the Blade 3.3m instead. A lethal kite to learn to buggy with especially on a gusty inland site in Aberdeen. It put me in hospital twice once with concusion and the other a bad gash on the hand. Flexi did also do a Viper and was their last rectangular design before the Rages i think, which i also fancied but moved jobs and cities about that time and then countries and when i got back to buggying things had moved on and there was an explosion of kites and companies out there when i got back into it.

1 Kite that was the most versatile was the Spider which came as a 1 kite package that could be a 1m and cover the whole range up to something like a 6m. It managed this through a series of zips http://www.speridertraction.ic24.net/ and thought this was a very clever idea never got to fly one though so no idea how they flew, Saw 1 on trade me about a year ago.

Another design not followed through was the tapering wings like the competition-X series from quadrifoil and 1 of the best kites with this design was the predator and was the kite that set the one first speed record in a buggy back in the 1990's of 53mph.

Traction kites have moved on so much and even though the old kites kept you on your toes, i do prefer the foils of today where they are safer more predictable which equals more time on the beach than in hospital.

haha, small world, i believe i may have been the guy who bought that spider...
i bought a pl classic and spider modulus kiteset as a package, i have no idea why now as i sold it all, i think their was a bit of kit in the package that i needed but it only came as the whole lot.... and it was the whole set! it had about 12 different panels...it was huge, actual have no idea how big it went...i flew it in the 4m setup and it was pretty smoothe an grunty but fairly heavy and not good upwind..and the bridal system was a work of genius after you figoured out how to lace it all togeather..

northernal321 wrote:


I thought they were a great idea at the time as i was a poor student back in the day and the spider modulus was cheaper to buy than buying the 9 or so kites it made into. Don't know if you could improve on the as i think it is limited in the low wind due to the zips it had. Like mentioned before is one of those kite designs that got left behind. Though i do think most of the design went into eliptical kites due to the fact that the paragliding companies like Ozone and Edel got into kite production. The eliptical kites IMO have a nicer shape to them as well which is probably another reason why they have been favored over the years.

They sure are pretty. Well some of them.

If this is a conversation about why kites fly the way they do I would love it if someone could explain why a de-power supposedly has less pull than a fixed bridle? ... Why does a 6m de-power cover the 3-5m fixed bridle range? I don't really understand that

imagine a sheet of paper held up flat infront of your face, then hold it tight and blow on it....because its flat 100percent of its surface area is catching the wind you blew.....now if you were to bend the ends of the sheet of paper towards you in a smoothe arc, and blew on it, the working capacity has been reduced, the wind just flows straight throught the ends of the paper pointing towards you and dosnt do any work, so even tho the paper is the same size its now less capable of catching the wind and doing work.

so most depower kites have a very curved canopy, fixed bridal kites generaly do not have asmuch canopy curve.

the flatter the kite the more wind it can catch,per given square m.. making it more powerfull than the same size kite with a curvy canopy.
tho ofton less stable, thoes curved wingtips do a great job of stabilising the kite like the fins in an aircraft.

its also down to the profile of the foil or its crosssection ,and its angle of attack to the wind when flying...
i dont really understand much about the profiles...a fat one is slow and lifty and wont stall as easy.. a thin one is fast and efficient but not as lifty and will stall more easily...but i dont kow how it affects the actual power of the kite.

the angle of attack is where depowers work mostly.if you held that bit of paper by the front edges and blew. the wind would flow through it like a flag, so its 100percent depowerd...if you started to pull that trailing edge in the paper would start to catch the wind and do work...the more you pull the trailing edge in, the more it catches the wind and the more work it does, right up till the effect of the canopy curve kicks in and your curvy 6m depower isnt as efficient as your flat 6m fixed bridal.

The way de-power is achieved in most foils is through adjusting angle of attack. For a foil profile to be efficient over a range of varying angles of attack requires it to be more stable at low angles of attack yet not have too much drag at high angles of attack. This usually achieved by making the foil profile a little fatter and have the center of lift further back in line with the center of effort or center of pressure. For this reason it is not as powerful or always as efficient at lower wind range as a foil of the same size in a fix bridle setup.

Great explanations! Thanks, makes alot on sense