Superman & Lois Lane

Cast your mind back to 1987, East Coast Stunt Kite Championship at Wildwood, innovative category. Ron Reich enters the arena wearing a strange-looking belt while his ground crew carries two kites into the arena. As far as I'm aware, this was the first time one person flew two kites competitively. Ron flew a custom-made pair of Spin-Off kites, one mostly blue with Superman graphics, the other grey and pink, depicting Lois Lane. Music of the routine was the 'Love Theme' from the Superman movie.

You can see part of  Ron's 'Superman' routine in the following video, starting at 11:46 and lasting until 12:38:

Fast forward almost 30 years. The sails of these Superman and Lois Lane  Spin-Offs appeared on eBay, and were snapped up by an American kite flyer who was aware of their historical significance. He wanted to make sure these sails remained within the kite-flying community. He set out to re-frame and re-bridle them, and asked for advice on the Gone with the Wind forum, where he also posted some pictures of the kites. I expressed an interest in the kites, and to make a not very long story even shorter, soon afterwards the two kites flew across the Atlantic towards me.

So here are these unique historical kites, on the ground and in the air in the UK!

Besides being excited about flying kites with such a heritage, and honoured to be trusted as the custodians of these kites, I wanted to add a little extra to flying them. One obvious extra would be to give Superman a cape! Following a suggestion from Ca Ike on the Gone with the Wind forum, I got myself two lengths of organza, one red (for Superman) and one white (for Lois). Two questions: does it look good on the kites, and does it interfere with their flying?

Answer to the second question was a clear 'no'; the organza is so light it hardly creates any drag. And you be the judge as to the answer to the first question ...

Obviously, when we fly them at official events, we have to maintain the tradition of flying them to the 'Love Theme from Superman', and I picked Shirley Bassey version for this.

Hopefully coming to a festival near you soon!

A full set of Joel Scholz dualies

Those of you who have been following this blog for some time may be aware that the origin of the name 'Flying Fish' lies in our very first team-kites: a pair of 'Fish' and 'Shark' kites, designed by Joel Scholz. These particular kites are made by Go Fly a Kite, and are a cheaper version of the original Joel Scholz kites, made by Sky Delight Kites. As that company no longer exists, original Joel Scholz dualies are rare as the proverbial hen's teeth ...

As we had a pair of 'Fish' and 'Shark' kites, I was looking for second 'Fish', to allow us to fly three kites with our team L-katz, with the 'Shark' chasing two 'Fish'. While doing so, I stumbled across a full set of original dual-line Sky Delight Kites, for sale for a very reasonable price. The rest, as they say, is history ...

The weekend weather this year so far has been either wet and stormy, or without any wind, but Good Friday finally offered the perfect opportunity to let all five take to the air and try them out. So here they are, in order of flight on the day!

Jaws:

Neptune:

Luna Moth:

Kestrel:

Hummer:

They fly well and should, I feel, be considered as light-standards. They do need some pressure on the sail. Not much, but as long as it's pretty constant, they're fine. So they can go quite low, down to maybe 3mph, but are decidedly unhappy when the winds goes above 15mph. Personally, I wouldn't want to fly them above 12-13mph.

So here's the full set at our normal flying field in the New Forest! Isn't that a sight for sore kite-flying eyes?

Obviously, the aim is to fly them together, so we spent some time tweaking bridle settings to make sure all kites flew the same. As Neptune felt best when we flew them one after the other, we decided to match all kites to Neptune. First up was Jaws, and it only required bringing the nose forward by a tiny amount to make it fly happily with Neptune.

We then matched both Kestrel and Hummer to Neptune, and again it only required minimal bridle adjustment. With all kites matched to Neptune, the prediction was obviously that Kestrel and Hummer would also fly well together and, sure enough, they did!

And what about Luna Moth? From the moment it took to the sky, it felt different from the others. Not surprising, as it's designed differently. Flight was very slick and smooth, and, as it lacks the tail, also completely silent. But despite the difference in flight 'feel', it matched the others very well in terms of speed, so no problem flying Luna Moth with one or more of the others. We do intend to fly all five with L-katz in due course, and I'm not sure that has ever been done with a set of these kites.

What we didn't get around to, because the wind had dropped down to nothing by the time we had matched these five to each other, was to match our original 'Fish' and 'Shark' to these five. Will do so at the next opportunity!

Jacqui, thanks for the opportunity to get my hands on this full set of Joel Scholz dualies, and it's only appropriate historically that they remain together as a set.

Double Frisbee!

Among a job lot of 1970s kites I recently got my hands on was a pair of 'Frisbee King Kites'. Now I was aware of a 1970s Frisbee Skite, but not of this particular one. The Skite is mentioned in Ron Moulton's book "Kites", which was published in 1978, So possibly the Frisbee King came on the market a bit later, in the early 1980s?

The Frisbee King has a fibreglass frame, no cross spreader, and a thick polythene sail. I got them without tails, but added a pair of original blue Peter Powell tails, as I felt that would make the tail a natural extension of the kite. So here they are on our regular flying field in the New Forest!

How do they fly? Well, they're obviously not as precise as a modern sport kite, but I didn't expect that at all. The trailing edges start flapping quite a bit when the wind goes towards 20mph and above, so they're happier at 12-15mph or so. 

Flying them together works fine, as long as you don't try to fly sharp corners; they really don't want to do that. But loops and curves, multiple wraps and patterns like that are fine. And because of their rather unusual frame design, they really look different from any other kite we have, almost bird-like. We'll definitely fly them for fun after a practice session, and who knows, maybe also at a festival or two. 

And, by the way, if anyone has more information on these Frisbee Kings, such as when they were made, we'd love to hear from you!

Value for money?

I check eBay frequently and regularly for kites, and quite a few kites in my quiver have arrived there via eBay. One kite which keeps popping up is a small dual-line kite, which appears to be official (?) merchandise for the McLaren Mercedes F1 team. It's also available via amazon, where it is described as a 'classic'. Classic in what sense? Not quite clear ... Price for the kite usually varies between £9.99 and £14.99, but when it was listed for £4.99 on eBay, a sudden morbid sense of curiosity made me click the 'Buy It Now!' button .... How bad would a £5 kite be? I just had to find out!

Wing span is 1.14m, and it has a fibreglass frame. Stitching quality is as you would expect: Tim Benson would probably rather start selling knitting sets than sell a kite with this level of workmanship ... So no surprises here: you get what you pay for.

So how does it fly?

Well, much better than I expected! Which, of course, says heaps about my level of expectation ... It tends to oversteer, but once you get used to that, it doesn't fly too bad, is a little bit noisy (but nothing like a North Shore Radical), tracks reasonably well, and I even managed to squeeze an axel or two out of it (and keep in mind, I'm not a trick flyer by any stretch of the imagination). It does need a bit of wind pressure in the sail; although it flew fine from 5-6mph onwards, it tends to drop out of the sky when the wind goes below that. Launching in light wind can be a bit tricky, but there's always the 'throw it up in the air' method to fall back on!

So is this wee kite value for money? Well, let's put it like this. Assume, for simplicity sake, that a top end kite will set you back £250. Is that top-end kite 50x as good as this McLaren kite? If you were offered the choice to either fly a top-end kite for one weekend per year (and no flying kites for the rest of the year), or fly this McLaren kite every weekend of the year, what would you choose? Fly once a year with a top-end kite, or fly every weekend with this £5 kite? You decide whether the kite is value for money ...

Taking my tongue out of my cheek again, is Flying Fish going to get a second one for pair-flying? Ermmm, no ...

Double Oxray!

If you mention the name 'Dunford' to a kite enthusiast, he or she will surely think of his Flying Machine. Much less well-known is the fact that Don Dunford designed more kites besides the Flying Machine: the Stingray and related kites. This 'family' of kites consists of three: the basic Stingray, the Oxray (an improved version of the Stingray) and the Skyblade (a larger, multi-coloured Oxray). Being interested in the early history of dual-line kites, of course I've been keeping my eyes peeled for these kites, and the Oxray turns out to be like buses: don't see one for ages, and then two pop up ...

One of these two was a present from Bill Souten / MKF, the other one came straight from the original source, as Cochranes of Oxford still had a few in their warehouses (before you ask: yes, they also had a basic Stingray and a Skyblade!).

Oxrays are small kites (99 cm wing span) and are fun and easy kites to fly, but do need constant wind pressure on the sail, 10-12mph is ideal. This means they don't like stalling or flying at the edge of the wind window. But they can really turn on a dime, though!

Having two of them means we have to fly them as a pair, of course.

Flying them side by side shows they're not exactly the best precision kites. They're very sensitive to input so difficult to get them to track well. We took them through a series of official STACK figures, and I don't think we would have scored high for any of them .... Still, we had fun flying them together, and I don't think there are many kite teams in the world who have a pair of Dunford Oxrays in their quiver!

Piranha & Piranha Bait

Flying Fish is and firmly remains a dual-line pair, but that doesn't mean we don't look at kites with fewer or more than two lines, especially if they're a bit fishy ...

Talking of fishy kites, for a long time I've been aware of a pair of fish-shaped fighter kites, designed by Joel Scholz. They're called 'Piranha' and 'Piranha Bait', and as they're no longer produced, getting my hands on a pair of these proved to be a real challenge. Fortunately, perseverance paid off, and thanks to a kind soul on the Gone with the Wind forum, Flying Fish now has a pair of 'Piranha' and 'Piranha Bait' fighter kites!

Their maiden flight was in a quite strong and blustery wind, which didn't make flying them easy. We'd be the first to admit that our skills in flying fighter kites isn't anywhere near our dual-line flying, but we did get them to fly.

And they weren't easy to photograph either ... plenty of pictures showing a clear blue sky with not a kite in sight!

New main routine

When we flew our main festival and competition routine at Portsmouth Kite Festival a few months ago, we had already decided that it was time to retire our 'Ruthless Queen' routine, and to start working on something new for 2016. Doesn't mean we'll never fly this routine again, of course, but we felt we needed to try and up our game a bit, and practice a routine which is much more to the music than with the music. This was the main criticism we got after we'd flown at the National Championships in June.

Now for those of you who have followed this blog for some time know that we still have a routine 'on the shelf', which we started some work on a while ago, but which was then put on the backburner for various reasons. I'm talking about a routine to 'Chariots of Fire', originally composed by Ron Reich of Top of the Line fame. The nice thing about this routine is that it has already been worked out with time points, etc, so we can focus purely on flying it to the music, and get more experience in flying it no matter the wind strength. A future step would then be to write our own routine, completely from scratch. But that's indeed for the future.

In the meantime, we have started practicing this routine, adapting it as we go along to suit our kites and style of flying. Sometimes, that tweaking is just a matter of leaving out or adding a single element; sometimes it involves more major changes to a pattern, or even doing something entirely different, if we feel it can be made more interesting or adds more variety to the routine.

The practicing we've done so far has clearly shown flying a routine to music is a completely different ball game! Especially adapting your flying to the prevailing wind such that those circles are flown at exactly the same point in time, no matter whether your kites go slow or fast. That in itself ought to make us better flyers, if nothing else.

We sincerely hope to have this ready as our main routine for 2016, at festivals and for competition, and that's what we're really going to work for over the winter. Hoping to come to a festival near you!