Kite flying
A collection of descriptions that should make clear how to perform
some basic moves, and a lot of tricks....
Credits
This page started out as a partly extraction from Dodd Gross's "DJ Sport Kites"
1994 catalog (with Dodd's permission !) together with a few postings in
rec.kites.
The list has grown a lot since then, because a lot of people have contributed,
most of them via rec.kites and e-mail.
Special thanks should go to
for their extensive contributions (order of above list irrelevant...).
Ambidexterity...
A lot of trick descriptions refer to a specific side (left/right) of the
wind window explicitly stating which hand to use to do what and which
direction the kite will go.
Of course, since we all want to be ambidextrous (love that word too...), most
descriptions can be mirrored in the center of the wind window.....
Use your imagination here ! In fact use your imagination anywhere, maybe
some new tricks will come up.....
Adding difficulty levels
Some people have shown interest in adding difficulty levels to the tricks.
Since I'm not an experienced flyer, AND it's nearly impossible to be objective
about this, It's probably best to have a lot of people decide.
Since a lot of people would like a list of some sort that gives an order in
which to learn the tricks, here's one for the basic moves. It's
not the only way to do it, it's a
way to do it. A list for the rest of the tricks would be very difficult
since people tend to find different things difficult...
- basic launch
- basic landing
- pull turn
- push turn
- combination turn
- stall
- spin stall
- snap stall
- leading edge launch
- fly away
- pancake
- belly launch
- cartwheel
- axel
- 180 flat spin
- wing tip stand
- ...
After you know how to do these consistently, you probably know what makes
tricks difficult for you, and you can pick the next ones yourself.
More tricks
Other nice documents to look at are the
STACK compulsory figures page
and the Animated stack kite figures.
Availability
There are french and
german
translations of this page.
Also I've made a zipped version of the complete
html file available on request. Note that this file is not completely
self contained. You' be missing the
and 
pictures.
If you have additional information on a trick (clearer description,
know who invented it) or if you know a trick that is not in this page.
or if you have any other remarks or additional info ? mail
me
(pp@win.tue.nl).
I split up the tricks file to allow for faster download times
but since I guess there are people who print this stuff I have
the single file version handy as well.
Contents
Last modification : Friday June 22, 2001.