Awesome post here on Kite Forum looking at Kitesurfing safety from a fighter pilots point of view:

There are old fighter pilots and crazy fighter pilots but never old crazy fighter pilots. This seems to directly translate to kitesurfing. I am an instructor pilot in the F-15E fighter jet and a graduate of the Air Force Flight Safety School (similar to the NTSB aircraft crash investigation school). I wanted to discuss some of the corollaries between kiting and flying to 1) Give you an idea of how we execute an inherently dangerous job of flying fighter jets and 2) How you can apply this to kitesurfing safely and confidently.

1. Know Your Jet- Fighter pilots are required to know the ins and outs of every aspect of their aircraft—their life depends on it! This includes the intricacies of the mechanical and emergency systems but most importantly the flight limitations of the aircraft itself.
The difference in kites, bars, quick releases and harnesses is similar to the differences in different fighter jets. Read the owner’s manual, visit the manufacturer’s site, familiarize yourself with your gear and most importantly, HOW the safety features were built to function with your gear.

2. Emergency Training- Engine fires, ejections, spins, electrical failure are just a few situations we train to countless times in simulators before we even start the jet. The more you train to bad situations, the more your mind is able to store the appropriate actions in your subconscious; this is where ‘muscle memory’ pays the bills!
I have read many kitemare stories where the mishap kiter had his hands frozen to the control bar with the kite fully powered. Simulate bad situations such as getting drug through the water, lofted into the air, etc. and practice the exact hand movements and actions needed to save your pink butt!

3. “Chairflying”- I have logged 1500 hours in military jets but probably have logged twice that “chairflying”, which is literally sitting in a chair visualizing myself going through the entire flight; movements, actions, etc. Flying at over 1000 mph is not the place to be going over something for the first time.
I am sure that most most kiteboarders visualize their tricks, jumps, transitions on the beach beforehand, but it’s important to mention how much this helps with any action sport.

4. Risk Assessment- Consider having a glass jar full of change. Bad weather, inexperience, complex missions–take money out of the jar for each of these factors. The less change you have in the jar, the higher the risk. No change left in the jar? This is where the reward must outweigh the risk or it’s a no-go.
Bad weather/tides, offshore winds, obstacles/rocks, experience level, practicing new jumps/tricks- these are all things to consider the risk level when you kite. A smart kiter mitigates these risks such as wearing a helmet/impact vest, kiting with a buddy, safety boats in the area etc.

5. Contingencies- If something can go wrong, it probably will. Chances are Darwin will rear his ugly head. Taking a bird down the #1 engine intake while flying at 600mph at 500 feet was never part of my plan, however briefing that ‘hip-pocket’ emergency airfield sure did save my bacon.

Kite malfunction, line snapping, dead wind while 1 mile off the coast, high gusting winds, losing your board? Do you have a plan? Think about these ahead of time and always have an ‘out’.

6. Preflight- Ten minutes is spent before each flight performing a “walkaround” of the jet looking for potential flaws. It’s a good thing I noticed a sheared link in my landing gear before I jumped in; that would not have ended well!
This is preached in ad nauseum in the kitesurfing community for good reason. Don’t blow it off. Frayed lines, small tears in your canopy, quick release frozen up due to sand are all things you can quickly catch on the beach.

7. Wingman – Cheesy Top Gun lines…got it. Having a good wingman when you are partying downtown on a Friday night…always. But no kidding we always fly with at least one wingman to “check your six”.
Don’t kite alone, look out for other kiter’s, and always help a fellow kitesurfer if it looks like he/she might be in trouble. Same team Farva, same team!

8. Don’t exceed your capabilities- Air Force Fighter Weapons School Graduates (Top Gun) are the only ones qualified to fly at low level down to 100 ft. At 600 mph that’s about 1 second of reaction time between livin’ and a smoking crater. I know I’ve been trained down to 500 ft. so that’s where I stay. My mother thanks me.

At best I’m an intermediate kitesurfer, which means I don’t go trying the same stuff Hadlow is pulling off. Progression is continuous improvement with realistic steps and risk. Push the limits but within reason. “Progressive steps” keep you safe and keep others from having to rescue you from being an idiot.

Lastly, I’m simply a guy with a kite, hoping to pass on something that might get the brain pistons firing, and subsequently save someone from a “what the hell did I get myself into” situation. I’m sure I have only scratched the surface on this subject so pitch in your experience and we all can continue to learn to avoid being that ‘mishap kitesurfer’.
Pray for wind and pay it forward,

There’s a lot of good points in there that we would all do well to remember especially in the rush to get out when the winds in…I know, I for one, never check my kit before I go out.

Unfortunately you need a Saturn V rocket to test it though.

I imagine the relaunch was rubbish, but it would never back stall!

After coming back from her Instructor Training Course last year, Maria, one of our instructors started raving about using short lines, explaining how it made everything so much easier and safer. Always on the look out for ways to make things easier for clients (and indirectly ourselves!) I thought we’d better investigate.

We started by simply cutting some of the lines we had. We put a cut at 15m which meant we had one section of line that was 10m long and one section that was 15m long (they were 25m lines originally). We started using these lines in various lessons and monitored the results very closely.

The first thing we noticed was the effect the line length had on the actual piloting of the kite, the kites flew a lot faster on shorter lines and responded much quicker to any input from the bar. This had the effect of making the kite a little more twitchy but meant that due to the increased leverage in the bar the kite re launched almost by itself.

The potential power in the kite was also reduced by a huge amount, so much so that you could confidently leave a pair of students alone while you looked after another pair without worrying that any thing untoward was going to happen, because there simply wasn’t enough power available in the kite to cause problems. Even a 4m kite on 25m lines in light winds will pull if flown hard across the window.

That said the kite still flew great, and there was the added advantage that in the gusty winds we can get in Tarifa we could put up a larger kite on shorter lines, which sailed through the gusts with ease, and still posed no danger to students. Again to compare this to our old 4m kites on long lines, they suffered from the problem that as soon as there was a lull in the wind the kite fell out of the sky.

The lack of power and high level of control in the kite meant that we were effectively handing new students a toy, which they could play with without fear. Even the fact that the kite responded much faster to steering was more than counteracted by the lack of power. Students would happily zip the kite back and forth bouncing it off the beach until they got the hang of it, which they would within minutes as they weren’t terrified of being launched down the beach. It also helped to make our kites last a bit longer!

We’ve often found that the biggest hurdle to getting people to take real control of the kite is to get them to relax. While people are tense it is almost impossible to really feel the feedback you’re getting through the bar, as your death grip tends to override the more subtle signals from the kite. Once students relax, flying the kite becomes almost second nature. Where as before one false move with 25m lines could have students on edge and nervous for days afterwards, even the most catastrophic piloting failure on short lines only leads to a few whoops of joy! The results were instantaneous, especially amongst people who were a bit more nervours. They mastered the basics often within minutes, even in winds that before would have been considered borderline unteachable.

Once in the water we kept up the short line idea to see if would continue to produce results…in short it did. One big advantage of short lines is that as there is less line, combined with the almost automatic re launch, it becomes much more difficult to tangle the lines. Once in the water the amount of time this saves is breath taking. On full length lines, due to line tangles and difficulties relaunching we were averaging around 6 -7 full runs per person per day. On shorter lines this increased to around 20 – 30 runs per person. You can imagine the effect that all this extra time spent on the kite actually practicing the fundementals had on our students ability.

It quickly became obvious to me that people really do not need any power in the kite until they are attampting to ride, and it makes everyones lives much easier if the student is underpowered with a kite that can’t do any real damage, which relaunches easier and rarely gets tangled in any meaningful way until they are doing absolutely everything right. At that point you can hand them full length lines and they actually find it easier to fly as everything seems to happen in slow motion. They start to ride painlessly and rarely suffer the indignity of being sent over the top of the board and slamming the kite in to the sea as they have all the fundementals absolutely nailed. This frees their mind up to concentrate on the task in hand, getting up and going on the board.

We now have bars with 5m lines, 10m lines 15m lines and 20m lines. The reason we bought seperate bars is that we found that using line extensions eats up time if you need to change the line length…time that students are paying for. We also found they make any tangles worse as the lines get caught on the line sleeves of the extensions which makes everything 10 times worse. We took the plunge and bought seperate bars.

I can honestly say that our students learning time has been reduced by days, many more people finish the course fully confident to take themselves out when they get home and everyone leaves with MUCH better kite skills.

Going back to longer lines is something I will definitely not be doing in a hurry!

Bet his first thought was “Shark” though, followed by the inevitable drop everything and sink in panic. What do you reckon…real or fake?

Would you be worried?

K9AHTK6A4MQ7

The main reason I could determine comes down to economies of scale, although exact (or even nearly exact) figures are difficult to come by, it’s pretty obvious to me that there are a LOT more snowboarders in the world than kitesurfers. As a result there will be a lot more snow boards manufactured every year than kite boards, this drives down production costs and allows them to be priced lower.

Add to this the fact that kite boards have fins (which can be bloomin expensive) foot pads, foot straps and a handle (unless your cool and have taken the handle off!). All these accessories cost money and so it is probably fairer to compare like for like price between a snowboard with bindings and a kite board, when you do this the difference isn’t so huge.

When you actually compare the prices of high end snowboards against high end kitesurf boards you notice much less of a difference, top end production boards in both sports tend to retail for around 600 € the main price difference tends to appear at the bottom end of the price range where you can pick up a pretty decent snowboard for around 200 €. I would imagine this is due to there being a much wider variety of manufacturers all competing for the mass market of people who want to own their own snowboard but only snowboard once or twice a year so aren’t going to pay top dollar for one…which lets face is the category that most of us fall into. The kitesurfing market simply isn’t large enough to support this many manufacturers and so competition on price at the entry level is less fierce.

Any thoughts?

What do you think?

These things take off and then spin around, using kite like technology, mimicking a ground based wind turbine and generating energy…absolutely incredible..I wonder if any of this technology can be transferred to kitesurfing?

Kite like wind turbines on TechCrunch

Generating electricity with kites?

Makani Wind circle

Flying a kite to produce power may conjure up images of Ben Franklin, who sought to prove lightning was electric. Makani Power releases a turbine blade into the air, seeking to harness wind energy at higher altitudes.

The Makani Airborne Wind Turbines, which resemble mini airplanes, are launched when wind speeds reach 3.5 meters per second. Rotors on each blade help propel it into orbit, and double as turbines once airborne. The blades are tethered to the ground with a cord that delivers power to throw them into the sky and receives energy generated by the turbines to be sent to the grid-connected ground station.

I would love to see these appear in Tarifa, what do you think, better looking than traditional wind turbines? Any engineers out there care to comment…to me this looks way beyond space age.

Tea is all you Need from James Boulding – Steez Prod'ns on Vimeo.

Keep up the good work James…loving the videos.