How To Fly A Beamer Kite

Hello, I'm Thomas from the Kitesurf Centre. Today, I'm just going to show you a couple of tips on how to fly a kite and how to get into these brilliant sports of kite flying. I'm now going to show you how to fly a beamer kite.

So, a beamer is a name of a kite made by HQ Power Kites, so it's a type of kite. It's a four-line power kite, so you've got two front lines or power lines and two break lines. So if you have a quick look at the kite now, you can see this one's actually a three-meter kite.

It's also, another for it is a foil kite or parafoil kite, so we've got these air vents at the front. The wind blows into these air vents, fills them up and forms the air foil shape which allows our kite to fly and give it a lift or pull when it's down a bit lower. We've also got this bit of the kite, so this stringy mess is also called the bridle.

So, that supports the kite's shape in the sky and allows us to control the kite, steering it left and right. We go to our four lines, so we've got two front lines or power lines going into the main bridle here, one on each side, the left one and the right one, and then we also have a break line. So, you can see this is attached right along the bottom of the kite, so this part of the kite is also known as the trailing edge.

This break line is mostly used for landing the kite and also launching it back off the ground. If you crash it, well, you can also use your break line to speed up the turn slightly in your kite. So now, I'm going to go down to the handles and get the kite in the sky, and I'm going to show you how to fly it.

So first of all, we just need to get the kite into the sky, so I've put those stones around the trailing edge holding it down really nicely. I just need to walk back, get some tension on the lines, and give it a bit of a tug. You see I'm keeping the handles on these angles so these front lines are tighter than the break lines.

So, always you're holding your handles like this so the kite's going to fly forward and it's not going to fly backwards. There we go. The kite's up in the sky and now, we start to move it around and have a bit of fun.

So, when we steer our kite, what we want to do is to pull on one side or the other. So if I want to make the kite go right, I'm going to pull right or on to the left, I'm pulling left. So you see my movements with my hands here, left and right, I'm doing big movements at the moment so the kite's doing big turns in the sky.

If I want the kite to be really controlled and gentle, I just do little movements like this, so that moves around really really slowly. So, when you start, just do small movements like this until you get confident and you can start to do some big movements. So you can see the hold I'm trying on these handles, I twist it forwards, the tension is all in the front lines.

I can land the kite by putting some tension onto the back lines, so I'm going to tilt the handles the other way so the pressure's going to go like that and that's going to land my kite. And that's how you fly a beamer kite. .