How the Internet affected kiteboarding | Hacker News Reader

How the Internet affected kiteboarding

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65 pointsrichardburton33 comments

I've recently got back into skydiving after a break of 7 years. The explosion of go pro videos, youtube and discussion forums has had a similar effect as described in this article.

Combined with the ease of spreading info was the proliferation of indoor skydiving wind tunnels. Being exposed to a new idea and then being able to practice it in the tunnel for an hour with out having to make 60 skydives means the lag between innovative ideas to wide spread adoption is so remarkably short now.

Unfortunately, I think with the more dangerous sports this progress is associated with a lot of people pushing way beyond there skill level. Skydiving is a fairly dangerious sport, but base jumping + wing suit + near terrain following is practically suicidal. It looks awesome on YouTube, but they don't give any indication of wind which is absolutely critical etc etc.

Edit: youtube.com/watch?v=PPmWOA9cVM4&feature=plpp

PS: Check out birdmen the original dream of flight on netflix and take note of how many times they mention dead people.

Yep, out of 17 BASE accidents this year 15 were in a wing suit. I didn't do a wingsuit BASE jump until I had over 200 BASE jumps and 1400 skydives. Now every new skydiver rushes to do it after a single year of experience, and the numbers show what a great idea that is.

Didn't think I'd run into a BASE jumper on Hacker News. Certainly wouldn't have thought he or she would have a BASE number as low as yours...

I don't jump anymore, but I was active from 2003 to 2007ish. Curious if we've met elsewhere, online or irl... drop me an email if we did.

Where the heck do you find an indoor skydiving wind tunnel that you can use solo for one contiguous hour?

http://www.iflyglobal.net/locations.html

There are also ones in NC and two near LA. Granted to do one hour by yourself is hard to do you can split it in 15 or 10 minute blocks, which was likely what he meant.

Oh, I actually tried the iFLY location in Hollywood. But I only did 2 flights of 1 minute each(!) I did not remember they offered 60-minutes blocks of time. But at a price of $975 that is very steep... http://hollywood.iflyworld.com/flight-info/experienced-flyer It sounded like Fuzzwah had cheaper access to wind tunnels.

I have friends that have spent $10K - $20K in a year on time and one friend that works at M$ and spends all of his disposable income on it. You can get time for $500 or $600 an hour after you're experienced and then split it with others in the bigger tunnels so you are all flying at once.

Considering you get less than 2 min of free fall from a normal jump it's still cheaper and way safer for practicing stunts even at 1000$ an hour.

Group buying a block of time drives down the price a bit, but much like everything else skydiving related; it is expensive.

I've only got about 15 mins of tunnel time logged. I've done ~60 skydives and was lucky enough to be invited to tag along with a friend who had purchased a 30 min block at the skydive AZ tunnel. We'd been jumping together that day and I'd been struggling to fall as slow as other people in our group. They threw me into the tunnel and in the space of the 1st two minutes had taught me how to adjust my fall rate WAY better than I had been doing. Getting instant feedback on your body position dramatically shortens the learning curve. Compared to trying to get coaching during a normal skydive, even when debriefing with video; where you have to repack, manifest for another jump, take the ride to height and then try to implement the adjustments you'd been instructed about some 45 minutes prior.

So yeah, "burning" ~$150 to get 5 mins of tunnel time seems expensive. I hadn't spent any of my own cash on it exactly because I thought it was too rich and I'd rather actually skydive. But now I see that investing that $150 to ensure I didn't waste another 4 or 5 jumps (~$200 including gear hire) learning to fall slower saved me a load of frustration and a bit of money.

That's why I think the tunnel is an amazing learning tool. When you're in the tunnel there is no distractions, you're in there to learn and improve. When I skydive I'm still trying to learn and improve, but mostly I'm doing it for pure enjoyment of the experience of flying bigger formations.

Internet has made a big difference for kite boarding, but I would say it has had the same effect on windsurfing recently so I don't think the comparison is necessarily correct. Rather it is the differences in the sports themselves that are making windsurfing lag behind:

1) windsurfing is much harder to learn and not as enjoyable at first (in fact it can be a pain) so people give up quicker

2) kitesurfing, for the new guy, is a lot more spectacular and gets a lot of "wows" on the beach, so it attracts more people

3) I must admit kitesurfing equipment is a lot lighter and easier to carry around

4) Windsurfing, being an older sport, has an "old" image. People generally think its slow and boring, and that you need huge waves to have fun. However things have changed drastically. Take a look at a few videos on http://www.continentseven.com to see what I mean

Side discussion- As a kitesurfer/snowboarder/skater I think can appreciate the more technical aspects of windsurfing and not just look for 'wow' factor. But what I find difficult to watch in freestyle windsurfing is the 'sinking' or 'stopping' after tricks. It seems that in order to do anything really impressive you're going to just stop after you land. I think the best looking tricks in windsurf (and all of these sports actually) are ones where you leave the tricks with (close to) speed you entered with - such as certain tricks done on waves or some of the less technical 'pop' tricks. To me the root of this problem really comes down to the size of the gear you are having to throw around. In comparison, kitesurfing really frees your body up when riding and allows you to move around more in the air, as well as providing a 'pull' from with more freedom of control than a windsurf sail.

Well actually, you can do nearly all the tricks in windsurfing without stopping and sinking and coming out of it planing... it is just incredibly difficult to do though. Even the top surfers don't manage very often

The developments in acrobatic paragliding follow a similar theme: it used to be you'd do trick A, then resume normal flight, then do trick B, resume normal flight, trick C, etc.

Now it's all about instantaneous transitions between tricks. Pal Takats's video explains it brilliantly and impressively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW9lncIP4ac

Strongly recommended!

Wind surfing doesn't seem old and boring to me. I see it as the next stage in evolution after the Laser.

For those who are confused by silverstorm's statement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_(dinghy)

It's true that windsurfing has progressed enormously in the last 10 years. However, the sport began in the 80s before the internet was commonplace and so its development was stunted in the beginning. I should have made the graph more clear.

You should mention Skateboarding. Kickflips took years to catch on because people only saw Rodney Mullen in skate-shop distributed VHSes.

That's really interesting. Although I've played around with a longboard I never got into skateboarding in a big way so I wouldn't feel qualified to write about it. Another interesting example is the Triple Cork in snowboarding:

Torstein Horgmo debuted it in 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFGqkq3QqRE

And now they're expected at each X Games: http://snowboarding.transworld.net/1000194812/featuresobf/tw...

Speaking of X Games and skateboarding...

Tony Hawk's first 900 was pretty neat. He was getting close to doing it, but couldn't quite nail the landing and it was decided to let him just keep trying until he got it. Even though it was over regulation time and it took him 10 tries they awarded him first place and none of the other competitors protested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/900_(skateboarding)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YYTNkAdDD8

Windsurfing also requires stronger winds. ~13/14 knots is enough to kite and jump around, and I think you need 3/4 knots to windsurf comfortably.

I think you have that backwards ..

I think a very similar article could be written for the RC (remote-controlled) community, specifically the rise of the multirotor (i.e. "drones": quadcopters, hexacopters, etc.). I was late to the game, so my grasp of the history isn't enough for me to write such an article, but I know this sort of thing has happened in the last several years. There are extremely active communities where people repurpose electronics designed for RC airplanes and (traditional) helicopters, flash microcontrollers to give better flight characteristics for multirotors, use Arduinos to create flight controllers and autopilot systems, etc. Even over the last 3 years all the technology has become extremely accessible. The RC community is probably the most helpful, curious, and resourceful online communities I've ever spent time with.

The RC community was pretty awesome even before DIY drones/Ardupilot, helping push the quick rise of electric flight and FPV cheap video over unlicensed RF.

Quadcopters wouldn't have taken off if MEMS gyros hadn't gotten cheap and easier to build with (flat Z-axis), possibly due to video game controllers and smartphones. Electric flight probably benefited from laptops then smaller portables pushing li-ion manufacturing.

If you look at helicopters of a few years ago, just getting a single yaw gyro was expensive.

For quadrotors, you could only get props for the counter-rotating motors in a limited selection of diameters & pitches.

The future of kitesurfing is apparently paragliding.

A combination of the two will be really interesting. Lou Wainman, one of the sport's biggest innovators, wants to give surfers wings. Advances in fabrics will help kite manufacturers create incredibly efficient shapes that'll allow riders to jump for much longer.

Truer than you know -- one of the paragliding pilots I've known got into it after first doing kitesurfing (and he's probably not the only one).

A very interesting message hidden in this post is that software patents are bad for innovation. Perhaps I am stretching things a bit by going from kitesurfing to software patents. The idea popped into my mind when I read passages like these:

"In the early days, there were small pockets of kiteboarders spread across the world. These pioneers didn’t work in isolation; they were able to share their ideas on sites like KiteForum.com. They posted clips of new tricks that they’d landed, improvements they’d made to their gear, safety tips, amazing new locations, and anything else they thought other kiteboarders should know."

"The lag time between someone inventing a new trick and everyone else catching up is much smaller when the innovators can distribute their ideas instantly."

Think about where we would be if companies didn't have to spend billions of dollars to acquire patents and, instead, invested that money towards driving true innovation.

DEMOCRATIZING INNOVATION- by Eric Von Hippel talks about this and uses a few extreme sports (including the birth of mountain biking) as examples:

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm

edit: Just checked and kitesurfing gets three mentions in the index and is the main non-software case study of chapter 7.

Yet the most widespread kite design today is patented and was developed secretly by two men.

Nevertheless, I agree with the author that in the early days collaboration (and competition) between innovative kitesurfers drove the sport forward. Even today the innovation does not come from the main manufacturers who do nothing but repackaging last year's models.

In the book Hippel talks about two different kinds of innovation, one which "lead users" can come up with because they're at the cutting edge of their field and wanting to go further, and another that manufacturers can come up with because they've got deep knowledge about manufacturing. If "repackaging" involves making it cheaper to produce then that's a good thing, even if it's not the cool kind of innovation that people like to celebrate.

Would the issue of personal safety not be a main difference between both domains? I would (wildly) guess that KiteForum contributors benefit from safer approaches to known and potential tricks, in a way that other innovators do not.

I'm not sure I buy it

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