Kites in chronological order after design year, from 1994 and onwards. 

The kites are grouped in sections of eight.

On smartphone: use finger for scrolling sideways to be able to see all pictures.

Details of kites # 9 – 16.

Click  the picture to get a larger picture.

Click the button under the picture to get more information.

Kite NamePicturePicture
Picture
9. Salida Sled


Salida Sled
Always ready to fly


Salida Sled - always ready in the pocket
TTPRES 2017


TTPRES 2017
10. Fly50


Fly 50
Fly50

11. Flag


Swedish Flag
12. Sueño de Barrilete


Sueño de Barrilete
Evolution 2009


Evolution
Evolution Plus


Evolution Plus
13. ReTurn


ReTurn history
Lightwind ReTurn


Uptions to ReTurn
Dual Delta


Dual Delta
Power Line Detector


Kedah Power Kite
14. Confusion (Fat Flat Rok)


Fat Flat Rok - Confusion
Nut a Rokkaku


Nut a Rokkaku
15. Red tail


Red tail

Harry Kane


Soccer Player
16. Sake Dako


Sake Dako
Sake Dako


Filling up sake


Dispensing Sake

The rest of the kites.

Click  the button in left column the get the details of the kites in the section.

1. A-Kross


2. Fold Black


3. Who's flying whom?


4. Volvolare


View details of kites 1 - 85. Go fly a Kite, Charlie Brown!


6. Sverker Longship






7. Ruler of the Sky


8. SHARK







17. Absolut Kite

18. Nokap

19. Flyn

20. WannaBees

View details of kites #17 - 2421. PentArch

22. Stockholm 1912

23. Coded & Decoded

24. Ikan & Sakana


25. Square Foot

26 BAHCO 10

27. Don't Waste Your Time

28. Money Laundry

View details of kites #25 - 3229. Imposters

30. Block Shot

31. YangTze

32. Butterfly


33. HumbleBee

34. Nyoman Shimmy

35. Roebuck

36. Ronbus

View details of kites #33 - 4037. Svein

38. akka

39. Niëlje

40. Forty³


41. Ririn

42. ThorNado

View details of kites #41 - 48

For the premiere in Uchinada 2006 the silicon hose was a little bit to big and the sake sprayed straight into the palate of those who dared to taste. They were amused.

This idea is borrowed from the kite fliers of Fredrikstad, Norway, who have dispensed liquor from a delta kite in Cervia.

I used a plastic bag of the kind they use in hospitals.

I Japan you can buy sake in small paper boxes like juice portion packages. I asked my friend Eiji Ohasi to bring a few empty boxes to Satun. I selected one of them, Kiku Masamune, and sent it to my nephew and asked him to paint it on ripstop.

The result is a box kite, Sake Dako, from which sake can be dispensed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiku Masamune 18 cl package

Since the Red Tail was so complicated to sew I thought I (after years of experience) would know how to make it more simple to sew, like letting the tube tail begin at the rear of the kite. I still wanted it to be a kite for strong winds so gave this version the name HarryKane [hurricane], but I later found out that there actually was an English soccer player with that name.

For the next version I renamed it to ThorNado, see no 42 in the gallery, and reintroduced the tapered tube tail and again starting as a tunnel keel.

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Since the Red Tail was so complicated to sew I thought I (after years of experience) would know how to make it more simple to sew, like letting the tube tail begin at the rear of the kite. I still wanted it to be a kite for strong winds so gave this version the name HarryKane [hurricane], but I later found out that there actually was an English soccer player with that name.

For the next version I renamed it to ThorNado, see no 42 in the gallery, and reintroduced the tapered tube tail and again starting as a tunnel keel.

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

Since the Red Tail was so complicated to sew I thought I (after years of experience) would know how to make it more simple to sew, like letting the tube tail begin at the rear of the kite. I still wanted it to be a kite for strong winds so gave this version the name HarryKane [hurricane], but I later found out that there actually was an English soccer player with that name.

For the next version I renamed it to ThorNado, see no 42 in the gallery, and reintroduced the tapered tube tail and again starting as a tunnel keel.

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

I Japan you can buy sake in small paper boxes like juice portion packages. I asked my friend Eiji Ohasi to bring a few empty boxes to Satun. I selected one of them, Kiku Masamune, and sent it to my nephew and asked him to paint it on ripstop.

The result is a box kite, Sake Dako, from which sake can be dispensed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiku Masamune 18 cl package

Since the Red Tail was so complicated to sew I thought I (after years of experience) would know how to make it more simple to sew, like letting the tube tail begin at the rear of the kite. I still wanted it to be a kite for strong winds so gave this version the name HarryKane [hurricane], but I later found out that there actually was an English soccer player with that name.

For the next version I renamed it to ThorNado, see no 42 in the gallery, and reintroduced the tapered tube tail and again starting as a tunnel keel.

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

I Japan you can buy sake in small paper boxes like juice portion packages. I asked my friend Eiji Ohasi to bring a few empty boxes to Satun. I selected one of them, Kiku Masamune, and sent it to my nephew and asked him to paint it on ripstop.

The result is a box kite, Sake Dako, from which sake can be dispensed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiku Masamune 18 cl package

Since the Red Tail was so complicated to sew I thought I (after years of experience) would know how to make it more simple to sew, like letting the tube tail begin at the rear of the kite. I still wanted it to be a kite for strong winds so gave this version the name HarryKane [hurricane], but I later found out that there actually was an English soccer player with that name.

For the next version I renamed it to ThorNado, see no 42 in the gallery, and reintroduced the tapered tube tail and again starting as a tunnel keel.

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

This idea is borrowed from the kite fliers of Fredrikstad, Norway, who have dispensed liquor from a delta kite in Cervia.

I used a plastic bag of the kind they use in hospitals.

I Japan you can buy sake in small paper boxes like juice portion packages. I asked my friend Eiji Ohasi to bring a few empty boxes to Satun. I selected one of them, Kiku Masamune, and sent it to my nephew and asked him to paint it on ripstop.

The result is a box kite, Sake Dako, from which sake can be dispensed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiku Masamune 18 cl package

Since the Red Tail was so complicated to sew I thought I (after years of experience) would know how to make it more simple to sew, like letting the tube tail begin at the rear of the kite. I still wanted it to be a kite for strong winds so gave this version the name HarryKane [hurricane], but I later found out that there actually was an English soccer player with that name.

For the next version I renamed it to ThorNado, see no 42 in the gallery, and reintroduced the tapered tube tail and again starting as a tunnel keel.

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

This idea is borrowed from the kite fliers of Fredrikstad, Norway, who have dispensed liquor from a delta kite in Cervia.

I used a plastic bag of the kind they use in hospitals.

I Japan you can buy sake in small paper boxes like juice portion packages. I asked my friend Eiji Ohasi to bring a few empty boxes to Satun. I selected one of them, Kiku Masamune, and sent it to my nephew and asked him to paint it on ripstop.

The result is a box kite, Sake Dako, from which sake can be dispensed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiku Masamune 18 cl package

Since the Red Tail was so complicated to sew I thought I (after years of experience) would know how to make it more simple to sew, like letting the tube tail begin at the rear of the kite. I still wanted it to be a kite for strong winds so gave this version the name HarryKane [hurricane], but I later found out that there actually was an English soccer player with that name.

For the next version I renamed it to ThorNado, see no 42 in the gallery, and reintroduced the tapered tube tail and again starting as a tunnel keel.

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/

For the premiere in Uchinada 2006 the silicon hose was a little bit to big and the sake sprayed straight into the palate of those who dared to taste. They were amused.

This idea is borrowed from the kite fliers of Fredrikstad, Norway, who have dispensed liquor from a delta kite in Cervia.

I used a plastic bag of the kind they use in hospitals.

I Japan you can buy sake in small paper boxes like juice portion packages. I asked my friend Eiji Ohasi to bring a few empty boxes to Satun. I selected one of them, Kiku Masamune, and sent it to my nephew and asked him to paint it on ripstop.

The result is a box kite, Sake Dako, from which sake can be dispensed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiku Masamune 18 cl package

Since the Red Tail was so complicated to sew I thought I (after years of experience) would know how to make it more simple to sew, like letting the tube tail begin at the rear of the kite. I still wanted it to be a kite for strong winds so gave this version the name HarryKane [hurricane], but I later found out that there actually was an English soccer player with that name.

For the next version I renamed it to ThorNado, see no 42 in the gallery, and reintroduced the tapered tube tail and again starting as a tunnel keel.

Red Tail, an experiment with a long tube tail on FFR. Could fly well for long time and then suddenly dive.

I wanted to have an extreme Fat (high AR) FR were the tail is an integral part of the kite, not as an add-on for stability.

I think it looks nice, but was too complicated to build and took too long time to adjust.

Built 2006

 

Nut a Rokkaku is another FFR.

It is not a Rokkaku; it is a nut.

Built 2009, lost but retrieved in Weifang 2012 (after offering a reward) and lost permanently in Satun 2017.

The Fat Flat Rok is not a traditional Rokkaku. A traditional Rokkaku has the cross spars bent to get stability, and the the aspect ratio is usually low.

The Fat Flat Rok has straight cross spars and an even or slightly high aspect ratio, making it look ‘fat’.

To achieve stability without bending the cross spars the FFR has an in-sail dihedral; the result of the same bow-tie shaped sail that is used in Sverker.

An FFR is not suitable for Rokkaku fights.

The Confusion was the first experiment with the bow-tie sail in Rokkaku shape, and I was delighted when it flew without tail: I had thought that something like the ‘windsock’ semi 3D bow of Sverker would be required.

Confusion is a super light wind kite.

Size: 330 x 275 cm; AR 1.2

Designed 2005

The Power Kite adventure in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia 2014 is worth the story.

I had anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to the line to supervise the flying. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran back, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. Just before sunset the power company staff came to rescue the kite.

Three guys climbed the pylon. The actual power line for one phase is a pair of cables running in parallel. One guy put like a sled on these two lines with a foot rest hanging down one meter. He then stood on this foot rest, with his body between the cables and his face towards the pylon and p-u-s-h-e-d the sled and himself backwards, using his arms. It was obviously a very hard work because every 5 minutes he stopped and had a rest. After about 20 minutes he had reached the spot where the kite had been caught. He managed to release the black arrow which was still flying, and then managed to pry loose the red arrow which was wrapped around the two cables.

On the ground I collected the kites. Only one spar was missing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dual Delta was also in the development line leading up to ReTurn. Two single point delta kites with long tail.

The first edition I made in 1999, but lost it in Weifang 2001: It was flying beautifully and I handed over the line spool to a helper and went away 10 minutes to take pictures. When I came back the helper looked sad and showed me the spool with a stump of line. A Chinese friend said he had gone looking for the kite but could not find it.

I have the templates, but the remake I have not got to fly properly yet.

The black and red Uptions need a bit of wind so I made an Icarex version in grey and cerise.

I like to fly the Uptions high up in the sky, where the arrows constantly move and dance, but the high altitude also invites to problems.

The long story of lost and regained started already at the first kite festival, Dieppe 2000:

  • Dieppe 2000 – while I was called away to collect the second prize for Sueño de Barrilete the wind died and the kite landed on the roof tops. The fire brigade was called and rescued it.
  • Echu Daimon, Japan, 2001 – The line was cut and the kite landed on a tree top on an island in the river. Japanese kite fliers climbed the tree, rescued it and returned it to me.
  • Taiwan 2001 – Crash landed in heavy rain and was run over by a car.
  • Hat Yai 2006 – The line was cut while anchored, and as I was following the direction of the cut line on the ground I suddenly saw the kite flying far away. I tracked down the end point: the very last 50 cm of the line had whirled itself around a twig and that kept the kite flying, still high!
  • Tanah Lot, Bali 2007 – The line was cut while anchored. I stood some hundred meters away and was actually looking at the kite and talking about it when I  started to think it was odd that it seemed to become smaller and smaller. So I realized what had happened and sprinted away. But it was an off shore wind, and as I reached the cliff edge I could do nothing but watching the kite slowly sink and disappear into the water. A sacrifice to the  sea gods.
  • Stockholm 2011 – First flight of a remake at a kite festival in Stockholm. The kite came down in a tree top, but I managed to get it down the next day.
  • Dieppe, Canada, 2012 – The light wind version was tied down and flew well. After lunch break it was gone. The line has snapped, probably just bad quality. I searched the forest downwind, looking up in the tree tops. Nothing. On my way back to the kite field I crossed a courtyard and had to explain to a woman why I came out of the forest. Two days later the woman and her daughter brought the kite back, with practically no damage.
  • Pasir Gudang 2014 – The line was cut while anchored. I searched in the line direction but could not find it. Later same day two Russian kite fliers told me they had good news for me: they had found the kite flying high outside a supermarket more than 1 km downwind! The line had got stuck in a tree branch there.
  • Alos Setar 2014 – Lesson learned from Pasir Gudang I anchored the kite in steady wind and sat down next to it to supervise. After some time I needed to get more drinking water, and as I stood with a new bottle in hand I saw all kites slowly coming down.  I ran, but not fast enough: The Uptions had landed on the 300 kV power line. At sunset power company staff came and rescued it. That is when I renamed it to ReTurn!
  • Ishizaki 2015 – Flying on a huge golf course in very strong wind in Okinawa the line was cut, probably by the long tail from an Okinawa kite. I had tied it down to take lunch when the announcer said ‘Andreas, your kite down’. I followed the direction of the line to the end of the golf course and over a big parking lot before I saw the kite: again it had landed in a power line!

ReTurn has a long history behind it of development and lost-and-found and the name change from Uptions to ReTurn.

In 1995 I saw a good friend flying a short train of deltas: three delta kites with long tails.

Small video of the tailed train:

Though the movement of the tails is very graceful it is obvious that the pull of the top kite disturbs the balance of the second kite, and the joined pull of the two top kites disturbs the balance of the third kite even more. My thinking is that in a train the kites should not interfere with one other but fly independently. That would require a bridle free line going through all kites. So I set out to make a single line delta kite.

In 1996 I had the idea ready, and made Njaa: deltas with short wide tails that made the kite look like an arrow. I turned one arrow upside-down to make it look more interesting.

Njaa – which is an expression of maybe having a different opinion

Njaa actually won the Gold Medal at Drakfesten på Gärdet the same year. Second Gold Medal in three years!

The unsatisfactory with the tails were that they were moving so much that the arrow shape often disappeared.

So next step was to make it with a rigid ‘tail’, i.e. a shaft, and I abandoned the thought of single point for this and decided to make the arrows larger; the plan was to make nine black arrows pointing up and one grey arrow pointing down.

I made the first black arrow in 2000, and when I was testing it one late evening on a beach in Abu Dhabi I realized that with that pull I would never be able to hold ten kites. I changed the plan and made the second arrow a red downwards pointing arrow and called the short train Uptions (a play with the words Options and Up).

 

I like to fly it dressed up in black pants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a red tie printed on it. I think this gives an extra dimension.

Photo courtesy of Bernhard Dingwerth.

I donated the Sueño de Barrilete to the kite museum in Pasir Gudang, but sort of missed it so I rebuilt it in 2009, slightly smaller and with myself as model and more thought-through design.

The metamorphosis

 

 

 

Already in the middle of the 90’s I got the idea of making a metamorphosis kite with a man flying a kite flying a kite flying a kite and so on, each kite transforming gradually into a Malay kite, but my design was too difficult for me to make at that time: I had the bottom kite flying the next kite from his raised hand and the next one the same, and I realised that was a significant balancing problem.

When the invitation to Dieppe 2000 came and the competition theme was Metamorphosis this idea immediately popped up again and I knew how to simplify it by just making it a regular train.

At that time I was working in Abu Dhabi, and I asked a collegue to be the template for the man at the bottom. I took a photo of him in suitable pose and started to make it. Only the bottom kite needed a special frame, the rest had simple crosses with eddy dihedral fittings.

At that time I had a second passion: Tango – the real Rioplatentian tango, and I had found a few tangos where the lyrics were about kite. ’Kite’ in Argentinian Spanish is ’Barrilete’, and there was this beautiful tango by Eladia Blázquez about a man wishing, dreaming of to be a kite: ’Sueño de Barrilete’ – Dreaming of a kite. (composed 1960).

Consequently I named the the kite Sueño de Barrilete,  and the judges in Dieppe had me humming the tango. Obviously it was convincing enough so I got the second prize.

Sueño de Barrilete with the composer Eladia Blázquez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwdaSBF5G8A

          

Collegue Per modelling       First  and second steps of metamorphosing

Before going to watch the first game Sweden played at Euro Cup in soccer 2000 I made a kite with a Swedish flag to fly on the beach during the intermission: my colleagues and me were to watch the game at Sheraton garden in Abu Dhabi.

There was no wind and Sweden lost the game, but I have been flying the flag now and then elsewhere.

This kite is also courtesy IKEA, and the model is simply a fighter kite with balancing tail on the opposite side where the free part of  the flag is.

Fly 50 is an A-Kross train I built for my 50th anniversary. I had got hold of a lot of blue and yellow ripstop banners from IKEA from their 50th anniversary 1993: they were hanging all around in the shop. We in Sala Drak & Tangosällskap got the banners under promise not to use the logo, but since the bottom part had this beautiful written number I could not resist using it when the right time came.

The train is of course 50 kites long. We got banners with 30 and 60 cm width; just less than 50 of 30 cm width, so I had to fill up the last three positions with Della Portas of 60 cm width.

The kite has been re-used at other’s anniversary, like in Thailand and for Sarawak. Unfortunately, in Singapore the train was cut and half the train went to sea. I scrapped the rest and kept only two cells.

In 2017 I had the honour of being the President for Teh Tarik, a secret association of kite fliers attending the kite festival at Pasir Gudang. When stepping down I wanted a parade (some presidents do want this), so I made Salida Sleds for all the members and Hei Ge (Black Brother) video recorded the parade.

An armed park warden flying my Salida Sled in Arusha National Park, Tanzania

A pocket kite should always be in the pocket, ready to be flown at any spot.

 

Ankor Wat in Cambodia                                  Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, at OSOW 2001

  

Niagara falls, Canada                                       Attacked by a bird of prey in Dakar, Senegal

   

Petra in Jordania                              Sunset in Sanur, Bali

OSOW 2006, Ngorongoro crater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O

 

Salida Sled (1998, 2002 & 2016) is a pocket kite; a small tail free kite that can always be carried, complete with line and winder, in any pocket or purse. It is made out of one single piece of material (ripstop or plastic) and it needs only two (plus two) seams.

One input when designing it was to make it so it did not collapse as frequently as ”standard” sleds do, so that is why the shape is a ”cone”: The idea is that by making the rear end smaller the air pressure inside the skin should build up and keep like in a bubble.

Another input was to make it tail free. However, for some stiffer materials a tail seems to be needed.

Salida is the name of the opening step/figure when you start dancing tango.

               Kite, winder and bag

The plan for Salida Sled can be found here:http://windman.se/kite-plans/