Flying Techniques: the Airbow and the Revolution, by Carl Robertshaw

I started flying kites in 1995, on March the 11th, a week before my birthday. My wife bought me a little kite, and she's regretted it ever since. Well, I started flying kites when I was a little child; we've grown up with kites all our lives. But when I was about 16 or 17, I came down to London, went to the kite store there and saw these amazing carbon-fibre, ripstop nylon, colourful, high-tech kites. I thought I'd have a go at making one or two, and I did, and they worked. I've been flying kites since I was probably about two or three, and seriously, for competition and that kind of thing, for the last ten years. I think that little kite lasted about a week, and then I was buying a bigger one, a better one, and then a bigger one and a better one. I started flying on Epsom Downs; there were some great fliers up there, and that was where I first got a go on a Stranger.

I competed for ten years and have been retired from competition for three years now. I won numerous events and have been around the world several times, so it's been a great passion. 1993 was my first competition. That was Brighton, an individual competition. I kind of got around to doing that, but I had my arm twisted by Carl, my brother. He'd got into it; he'd started the team that I later joined, called Aircraft. At the end of that year I met Tim Benson at the Portsmouth Kite Festival. I was flying the Box of Tricks by then, and he offered to sponsor me. So I started flying Benson kites pretty much all the time, and I suppose the rest is history.

Evolver started when James and I carried on flying after the Aircraft days, the team we were in. There were four of us, and the team existed for five years. Then James and I got together to fly pairs. We competed for two or three years, I can't quite remember, but we won all the competitions in 1999 and in 2000. After that I flew in some competitions, but competition is fun, it gets your flying a level up and you get more skilled, but it's hard work as well. For me, kite flying is a fun thing. I like quad-line flying, dual-line flying and single-line flying, so I like every aspect of kite flying. Even the power kites: I've been in hospital with broken ankles from flying big foils. So I'm not exclusive to one type of kite.

A lot of people ask me what the secret is to really high-level kite flying and doing well in competitions. To my mind there is no real secret. It's lots of hard work and, in my case for sure, obsession: always trying to push myself, to push what we were doing in pairs, or in the team as well. We've put hours and hours, thousands of hours of work into what we do, and it's by doing that that we got to where we are. Also by talking to other people: there's a lot you can learn from just really closely observing other people fly, and we do that constantly. Of course, if you want to find out how good you are, entering competitions is about as objective a way as it gets. My name is Andy Wardley, this is James Robertshaw, this is Carl Robertshaw: welcome to Flying Techniques.

The Airbow, and how to set it up. Here we have an Airbow fresh out of Mr Benson's factory. This is, I think, the final prototype: the very last prototype or the very first production Airbow, depending on how you look at it. As you can see, I've flown it before. I always keep my lines attached to the kite and stuff them in the back. That way it's a lot easier: when you get out, you don't need to attach your lines. So let's just unroll this. We've got two large spreaders and four standoffs. Make sure the lines aren't wrapped around anything, and we need to find the centre part here. These two spreaders: find the end with the green tape. This is the part that's reinforced, and it needs to go in the middle. So that one goes through there, and this end goes on here, and then that slots in at the wingtip, and this one slots in at the wingtip here.

Then we take the standoffs, four of them. One end has a rubber band on it, the other end hasn't. Now, it's very important that you put it in the kite first, and not in here. Let me show you why. Put it in this end here and then try and force it in: it's under pressure, and if you slip, that sharp end will go straight through the kite. So always, always put it in the kite first and then slide them into the top. These are designed to be quite a tight fit, so they don't slip out. So there we go, that's your kite set up. As you can see, I've got my lines already attached, and they just wrap around the handles. So all I need to do is walk back and unwind my lines. The other benefit of keeping your lines attached to the kite is that they can't get twisted up and tangled. You might have a few twists, but you won't end up with any major knots, well, most of the time.

It's really a hybrid between a four-line kite and a two-line kite. I wanted to get something that channels the air in the same way that a two-line kite does, so that it carves as you fly it. It means you can fly it with big hand movements, like you would a two-line kite, but it's also got the control of a four-line kite. And it's totally symmetrical left to right and top to bottom, so you can fly it up, down, backwards, whatever. It makes a very nice kite: Tim Benson's superb design, of course. The fact that the Airbow can yo-yo is really what makes it stand out from other four-line kites. Most other four-line kites are really designed to spin around on the spot, like that. Let's see if we can do a crazy, insane burrito-wrap roll-up launch. Let's check I've got the right handles in the right hands first. Ready? Let's watch out for the bullet. Okay, this is all going to go horribly wrong. Here we go. I think we pulled it off.

So this is the Airbow. We can start with the kite on the ground. Now, to fly the Airbow, you have these handles here. Tilt the handles back and the kite will go up; tilt the handles down and, guess what, the kite goes down. The good thing about the Airbow is that you can also fly it like a two-line kite, using big hand movements to steer it around the sky. So if you're used to flying a two-line kite or a quad-line traction kite, you'll be familiar with flying it this way. When you're flying it like a two-line kite, it helps to hold the handles a little bit lower and get a full hand grip to help power the kite up. And the great thing is that, because we're flying on handles, we can stop it at any time. It looks very dramatic when you fly down and then stop.

Now, to get a really tight spin, you want to keep your handles as close together as possible and just tilt one right forwards and the other one right back. For the slower spins, use more of a hand motion. Another nice move you can do with the Airbow is just hovering above the ground. Again, it shows great control of the kite. You can also go on an edge, roll over onto the other edge and go right back. There's a little axel takeoff, and another barrel roll. Let's show that motion where we've got the kite on its side and we let the bottom hand right out. You can pull it in to take the kite down to a tip stab, let it out to lift the kite up, and then you can quickly switch hands to flick it around. See, I'm using big hand movements here, letting the bottom line go right out to keep the kite stable. When it's in that sideways position, you can also fly the kite one way and cut back the other, and it also flies side to side. Tip stabs. And that's a tip drag.

Now let's look at flic flacs and yo-yos. This is a very cool trick, a very, very cool trick. If you're flying in a light wind, you can just give a little pop and start the kite rocking. But today we've got a bit too much wind to do that, so we're going to use another technique, which is to put both handles in one hand, pull down on the top lines and release. That was nice. Let's try another one. To do the yo-yo in high wind, you can put both handles in one hand, grab the top lines, pull them down and then just let go. Big arm movements. There's a kill, and you can use that to go into a flic flac, sometimes, when the wind's not so heavy. There we go, there's a flic flac. That's a yo-yo there. It's trying the yo-yo. Oh, we're in a mess. We have a problem. Give it a little tug. There we go, we're out. There's no problem with a kite that can't be fixed with a little tug.

So let's look at some axels. One of the basic tricks of the Airbow, which comes across from two-line flying, is the axel, and the hand motion is very similar. Here we're going to look at the right-hand axel. We start by pushing the right hand forwards to let that side of the kite go back. As we do so, we pull slightly on the bottom left line, and then we just give a jab, a hard pull, with the top of the right hand. You push one hand forward, give some slack on the line, and then pop, and the kite flicks around. And here's the left hand: flying the kite mostly on the bottom right line, and then we're going to pull hard with the left hand, mostly on the top line. There we go. And there's the knitting manoeuvre for doing continuous axels.

Now, a really impressive trick you can do with the Airbow is a barrel roll. The easiest way to start this is to pull on one line and start the kite flying in a big loop, and gradually you go tighter and tighter and tighter, until the kite will roll with the end towards you, like so. It's very hard doing it slowly. Go round the loop. So the secret when you're doing a barrel roll is to pull on the top line. I'm just pulling on the top line here, and it spins around. Let's see that again, because I like doing barrel rolls. Oh, lovely. A slow one. And down to a tip stab. One-handed flying: you can fly it with one hand. Can you spin? So it's neat. Now let's see if we can be a bit clever here. We're just walking down the lines.

So now we're going to put this away. Handles together, lines together, and put that through there just to tie them off and stop it coming undone. Now, to undo it, the only thing that's really tricky is getting this bit out here. So grab it like that and pull. It's a little bit stiff, but they shouldn't come out with too much problem. And remember to always take the standoffs off the spar first, and then take them off the sail afterwards. The spreaders come out, and then you can grab one spine, grab the other, get all the bridle lines in the middle, the spars, wrap it up, and it's ready to go back in the bag, which is over here. The kite goes back in the bag with the handles, ready for next time.

The thing about the Airbow is that it's designed to be fun. I wanted a kite that was easy to fly, that you could pick up and learn quickly. It doesn't require very precise hand movements, so the best thing to do is just get out there and fly it. Just bash it about and see what it does. It's very stable, it's very recoverable, so just go out and see what you can do. Enjoy.

The Revolution was designed by two brothers, the Hadzickis, from California. They were making golf shafts at the time, and that's where they got the spar technology from: producing golf shafts. When the Revolution first came out, they decided, for some reason, to call it the Neos Omega, and fairly soon after that they decided to change it to the Revolution, which is obviously far easier to talk about. I tend to pack both kites that I use together, because I use two sails and then a combination of spars. I pack the two kites together and then roll the spars into the two sails, which is the way you pack away one Revolution anyway, so it comes out fairly neat and tidy. Today's a really light wind day, with really uneven wind which is dropping down to almost nothing, so it's certainly not one for the vented version of the kite.

When we lay the kite out: I'm fortunate enough to have quite a wide selection of spars to choose from, genuine Revolution spars, which is handy, if somewhat expensive these days. What that gives me is a choice of different weights to put into the kite. Anything from a very wide spar like this one, which I'd use in the vented kite. The diameter of the spar is very wide and the wall thickness is quite thin, but the stiffness comes from the diameter of the spar. When you compare that to what was previously a strong wind spar: a completely different diameter, and the flex in this spar is completely different too. With the thinnest spar, with the smaller diameter, I can put a fair amount of bend in it, although it's still quite stiff. The difference with this one is that there's much less bend in the spar. So we tend to use these in our vented Revs, in a very strong wind, up to maybe 25 or 30 miles an hour, and then we can still control the kite.

Now, all the stuff about wraps is in fact the number of layers that the spar is made of: each spar is a series of sheets of carbon which are rolled up. The way to tell the difference in the Revolution range is that the four-wrap spars say Revolution Equipped on the sticker, the three-wrap spars say Ultralight on the sticker, and the lightest ones say Professional Use Only. Pulling these end caps on, I have a fair amount of tension in the bungees all the way around the sail, so from these tips to the wingtips here, they're fairly tight. With more tension, the kite has more grip in the sky; what I mean by that is tighter control.

What I'm going to do this time is put a tiny overhand loop in the end of the loop on the end of the line, so when it comes time to take the line off, there's actually something you can pull on. On my lines, where most people would sleeve, and would probably use a black piece of sleeving for the bottom lines and a white piece of sleeving for the top lines, I just put a tiny black mark on there.

When I actually come to launch the kite, what I want to do is a little trick which I do when I'm flying by myself. It's to pull the kite upwards from this position, a kind of dead position, into an upside-down, leading-edge-into-the-ground launching position. The movement for this manoeuvre is something like putting full reverse on, which is pushing the thumbs forwards, and pulling back really sharply. In theory, the pull-back pulls the kite into the ground, and then, with full reverse on, hopefully it pulls the two wings up. From there you're in a position where the kite will actually fly, but it can be tricky and can take a couple of goes. So here we go. And hey presto, first time.

A couple of points on the handles. On the tops of my handles here I've attached some cords with knots on, which is very, very simple. It can be done with some kind of adjustable knot; this is a really simple way of doing it, so I can change the position of the line on the handle. At the moment it's on full forwards at the top on both sides, and on the bottom it's on the furthest out. Also, with the handles, what I've done is bend out this section. You put your handles together, bend them out on the ground, make sure they're at the same kind of angle, and that'll give you more leverage. So there we go, the lines are all clear and ready to fly.

Now, flying a slow rotation with the kite: that's the kite staying on the same point but rotating constantly around its centre point. When you're trying to fly this manoeuvre, a really good idea is to focus your attention, focus your eyeline, on the centre of the kite. And also, if there's anything in the sky, or there are some trees behind, try to fix the centre of the kite on a specific point in the background. To get a continuous rotation, it's a smooth movement of the hands like this, all the time pushing forwards on the handle that's controlling the bottom of the kite, as you see it. My hands are twisting the handles, and then I'm pushing the part of the kite that appears to me as the bottom as it comes around, so there's this constant movement.

The clock, as it's known, is a series of fast 90-degree turns: the kite rotates very quickly and precisely in the sky through 90 degrees and then stops dead. The way this is done is with a very fast hand movement, which involves twisting the handles to make the kite rotate: one thumb gets pushed forwards and one thumb gets pushed back. To do that, I really exaggerate the twist of the hand, so it's forcing the kite to come round. It's so fast that as soon as you start the manoeuvre you're stopping it, which sounds strange, but that's the way it works. You literally rip the kite into it, then equalize the kite and kill it in the next position, so at speed it looks like that.

The critical thing when you're flying the manoeuvre is your hand speed when you're executing it: your hands need to move really fast, and there's no way around that. One thing I tend to do, which I've noticed, is that rather than keep my hands in front of me all the time, when the wind drops slightly I move my hands out to my sides as I flip the kite round. That gets more purchase and a more dramatic movement on the kite, because otherwise I run out of room and kind of punch myself in the chest if I don't put my hands to the side.

Flying a precision square with the Revolution combines a 90-degree turn on each corner of the square with four straight lines. Flying a straight line with a four-line kite is harder than it sounds: because you have the ability to influence the kite in any direction, you actually need lots of control to fly in a dead straight line. To do this you need constant adjustment on the handles. So I fly a straight line along there, a fairly slow one now, and I'm constantly doing tiny adjustments to make the kite appear as if it's going in a perfect straight line. Which of course it is, but it doesn't feel that way, because you're doing lots of tweaks.

What tends to happen when you fly the kite in a straight line, or try to, is that it slides up or down the window. You need to compensate for that by sliding your hands like this, quite delicately, to just influence the kite a bit to come down or up and keep it balanced as it goes across the window. Then a flick turn, which is a quarter of that clock manoeuvre, changes the orientation of the kite. Also, I forgot to mention that I'm stopping the kite at the corner: I apply a bit of brake to stop the kite dead, then flick the turn, then pull it up, in that kind of rhythm. But again, little tweaks and balances are necessary.

Backwards flying: this is something that's grown on me, and it's extremely addictive. It's something that's probably easier with a four-line kite of this kind of size, because it travels more slowly and is more precisely controllable in the sky. At the moment, at this wind speed, there's only the tiniest amount of reverse actually making the kite travel: the slightest tweak and the kite stops. It's just a tiny amount. It's sometimes necessary to walk forwards as you come down at the edge of the window, or indeed go up at the edge of the window, because with too much reverse you risk pulling in a wing.

A lot of people are really impressed by playing with the crowd, landing on hands and things like this: those kinds of tricks that we Revolution fliers sometimes do. Most of that is based on keeping the kite still and making very small adjustments. The accuracy is basically done by getting any kind of reference for how close the kite is to something: if you land the kite just in front of someone, or you touch them. If you're in front of someone, you watch where they look at the kite, and you can tell by the angle they're looking at it how far away they are, or which side of them you are, and so on. Then you just need to take a few footsteps forwards, maybe one footstep forwards, and you know that when you come down again, as long as you don't move your feet, the kite will be right on top of them. So you can work out where the kite is in relation to the target, whatever it is you're doing, and then, as long as you keep your feet still, the kite obviously won't deviate much.

What I'm going to do now is fly the kite over to the left-hand edge of the window, as I see it. As it gets closer to the edge and the wind drops out, the leading edge of the kite is virtually vertical. As it comes nearer to the edge, my top hand, my right hand, comes further and further back to put the kite at a more and more extreme angle. It's going to touch the ground, but if I hold it there it'll lift back off again and just basically hang at a very acute angle in the sky, with almost no tension on the lines. That's one way of flying in very light wind, but I also find this a good technique when you need to make ground forwards in one motion.

Right, I'll fly a few axels, which involves putting the kite at quite an extreme angle so that it actually rotates and goes a bit flat. It enables the kite to spin on a different axis, just the same as a two-line kite really, but it's a tiny bit more complicated because of the four lines. The hand movement is a case of putting lots of reverse, then quite a sharp tug on the same handle, whilst giving lots and lots of slack on the other handle. I'm biased, because I'm right-handed, to doing the flick part of the manoeuvre with my right hand; that's what I tend to do. I also tend to get the kite rotating in the direction that I want to axel it in before I actually try the axel, which gives the kite some momentum in the rotation. So here we go: I'm going to rotate the kite once, and then here comes the axel. And try that one more time. So we come in and get a rotation to set the momentum, pick up the point, flick the wrist, push the other hand, and then recover it like that.

It always looks quite nice, I find, if you can recover it to a dead-stop position. When the wind picks up, you really need to move forwards, because, just the same as with a two-line kite, you need to kill the kite and get all the wind out of the sail. A good way to practise, if you've got the option, is to put heavyweight spars in the kite, so you make the kite overweight for the wind that you're flying in. That helps with the momentum when the kite rotates, and it also helps you knock all the air out.

I'm going to fly a dead stop: fly the kite down towards the ground really fast and then stop it dead a couple of inches above the ground, as long as it all goes well. In my case that involves holding the kite at the top of the window, which is kind of upside down with the leading edge parallel to the ground, and then accelerating it from there down to just above the ground and applying the brakes. I bring my thumbs forward just the right amount to stop the kite dead. So here we go: nose down, acceleration, flick the brakes. That was quite good. The ideal is that the kite stops dead, stays put and stays stable, and it's all about the balance of how much or how little reverse you put on to stop the kite. I'm going to try another one now: loads of pull, and then stop it dead. Which again was not too bad, but a bit of wobble at the bottom. And from there you can build it into other manoeuvres. A good one from there is to slide the kite off and do a parallel slide along the ground.

What I'm going to attempt now is to pull the kite down from the very top of the window: both handles go into one hand, you pull the top two lines and try to catch the kite. Like that. It's a bit difficult on lines this long, because this whole business is easier on short lines. You can throw the kite out again: what you can do is put your finger behind this knot here to get some purchase, and throw the kite out downwind, over the leading edge, at a slight angle. And you can also throw the kite with the fingertip around the very end cap there.

There's a manoeuvre you can do with the Revolution which is kind of like a flic flac, similar to a two-line kite, in that you see the back of the kite, then the front of the kite. The way you do that: if you imagine my hand, the top is the leading edge, so the kite is sort of balancing the right way up. With a sharp jerk of the handles, with lots of reverse, it pulls the two flaps up like this, and you then see the back of the kite. Then, with another sharp jerk, you pull the back lines really hard, you pull the flaps down enough, and as soon as they get past horizontal, the wind does the rest, and the two flaps kind of smack back.

In order to do the flip manoeuvre, you need to add some extensions and move the bridle point, so it's actually about here: when you look down, it's outside and closer to the tip. Once you've done that, when you do that jerky manoeuvre, the tips will flip up and they will come back down again. It's actually an easier one to do on smaller kites: on a Rev 1.5 it'll be more successful than on a full-size Rev 1, but it's certainly possible to do it. The consequence of doing that is that the leading edge bends a lot, because the two top points are further away. Then, in turn, to compensate for this, a lot of people put in a stiffer leading edge, which means there's not so much bend and it keeps the kite flat, but it adds weight. In my opinion it's a lot of extras and a lot of compromise to the standard flying of the kite to get one trick out of it. I've tried it and then gone back to just the standard setup. But there are lots of fliers who use it, and use it to very good effect in routines, competition routines, demonstrations and so on, especially with music, because it's such a dramatic manoeuvre.

Back to packing the kite away: lark's-head each pair of lines together, so the two top lines go together and the two bottom lines go together, and then just finish off winding it in. This is where you get a couple of wraps, probably right at the end, when you unwind it. As long as that's tight and you've got something to put round it. Certainly take out the back spars. That's always done by pulling the point of the tip like that, leaving the leading edge in the kite. Get a bit of slack by pulling the bungee and just disconnect that joint, and the same on the other end. Like that. Then lay that on the top, fold the top over, as neatly as possible, keeping everything fairly tight and together. Oops, he says. Wrap everything up. It's a bit of a pig's ear, this one, but it doesn't really matter. And then the lines, and that's it. Put the kettle on.