About kites and flying

Many people still retain the familiar image from their childhood days: the kiteflyer running and the kite bouncing somewhere behind, between the ground and the treetops. Adults seem to have this imprinted in their minds, and today's children are learning it like their parents before them. When I'm flying, people often wonder - why would a grown man care to play with kites? This is why, I answer and hand the flying lines to them. Try it. In a minute, the same people are wondering how hard it actually is. Looked so easy, after all: if the kite falls from the sky, you start running with the lines.

lotus 3/4 (custom)


For me, the kiting hobby is a two-sided affair. Flying is one part of it, of course, but designing and building are very important too. When you fly a kite, it's easy to relax and leave everything else out. You really have to feel at one with the kite to control it gracefully, and all your stress and worries disappear once you have it in the air. Bliss…
 
I build and design kites largely thanks to my artisan background - I have a strong desire
to build a kite that "looks like me". At first, I built kites from plans freely available on the Net. After a few succesful projects, the hunger for designing my own kites started growing.
   

In kitebuilding, you have to take into account many different areas such as materials, aerodynamics, and design as a whole, to reach as balanced and easily controllable an end result as possible. At the moment, I can say that it's relatively easy for me to come up with a kite that flies "pretty nicely", but that's not enough. The goal is to design and build a kite that excels in a number of things. It has to fly straight, cut sharp 90-degree corners and do a wide variety of tricks, as well as feel good at the end of the lines. It has to feel my own.

Kite Clubs in Finland

There are two kite clubs in Finland that are quite active promoters of kiting. Leijaseura (Kite Society of Finland) in Helsinki and Itätuuli (East Wind) in Joensuu. My own kite hobby revolves around Leijaseura, as I'm a member of its board. The club arranges various events all year round, and we have a regular fly-in meeting on the first Sunday of each month in Kaivopuisto park, Helsinki.


Kaivopuisto is not that great as a flying spot, due to many trees and large crowds, but our

visibility is great there - it provides a nice "window" into the kiting hobby. There are about 30 members in Leijaseura and six guys in my own active group of fliers, with whom I usually fly at Pikku-Huopalahti, currently the best spot for dual line flying in Helsinki.