B-2

It's been well over a year since my last post in this blog. The main reason for that is that I was out of action for quite a while for medical reasons (this is not the place to go into more detail; if you know, you know). And that meant no competition in 2024, and no Flying Fish performing at kite festivals.

I'm only now slowly getting back into pair-flying, as well as flying in our L-katz team; I definitely don't have the stamina yet to fly as long or as much as I used to, but things are very slowly improving.

So there hasn't been much to report for quite a while, except for one thing ... 

And that one thing is that, since the last blog post in September last year, we acquired a new set of team kites, called B-2, and made by Adam Pallas. For the last few years, we have been closely involved in the development of these kites, flying prototypes, providing feedback to Adam, etc. Here are some pictures of these prototypes:

Standard

Vented

Light

I must say, it was good fun testing out these prototypes, finding out their upper and lower wind limits, playing with bridle settings, etc! Note that the upper spreader goes through the sail and a t-piece behind the spine. Upper spreader and spine being connected like that results in a very stiff frame.

As we very much liked the way they flew, slow and steady, with easy (half-)axels, we ordered the full set for Flying Fish! Each set has three kites: light - standard - vented. The light goes as low as our T5 Cubans, and the standard has quite a wide wind range: we flew it together with both our Impulse UL and Impulse Mid-vent and it coped fine with both. The vented kite comes with both icarex and mesh patches, four of each per kite, and can also be flown without any patches. This makes it a very versatile kite, it essentially being five kites in one, from a heavy standard to a mega-vented, and so able to deal with a very wide wind range. So, with only three B-2 kites, we cover the full wind range we'd ever fly in. All kites also come with weights to add to the spine or wing tips, and the leech line is adjustable.

As you can probably imagine, lots of discussion on the colour patterns! In the end, we decided to go with mostly black kites with a swash of our individual colours, as black kites look really sharp in the sky. 

So here are Flying Fish's B-2s!

Light:

Standard:

Vented:

And in case you were wondering, yes, L-katz also has a full set of B-2s ...

Of course, testing the single prototypes doesn't give any direct information on how they perform in team formation, but they definitely fly together, in pair and team, as we were expecting them to. Here's to many more hours flying our B-2s!