In the winter of 2003, I ordered five WSO Standards from German Siebert’s Drachenkiste. They arrived a little later and the AERIALIS Team Flyers first saw the light of day! We flew them all together on Blokhus Beach twenty years ago, Anders, Christophe, Frode, Mathias and myself and it was looking something like this…

Since those early days the team has been through its highs and lows and looking back we all share some great memories. Practising on the fields of Ekeberg, Oslo and Fiskebäck, Gothenburg, competing in Cuxhaven, Germany and Cap d’Agde in France, trying to fly in way too much wind in Blokhus, Denmark, and demo flying at festivals and events in many locations around.

At the most, we have six pilots flying, but for the later years, we have been down to three.

This year, however, the AERIALIS Team Flyers are Anders from Sweden, Farid and Marco from Germany and me from Norway. A pretty recent compilation of team members. And I admit I was wondering how we all would work flying together.

Anders had created a new four-man routine building it up using more or less familiar elements. At first, he made drawings and a little later he created a stop-motion animation to visualise the routine even more.

We all watched this animated routine many times prior to the NKM and the preparations definitely paid off!

This new compilation of pilots flew the new routine together for the first time on Tuesday, May 23rd and after one and a half hours only we had nailed the complete routine from the start to finish! I never would have believed that!

So after the first one and a half hours only, we could start fine-tuning the flying and it soon looked pretty good!

The first day the wind was close to as perfect as it would get. At 3 to 5 m/sec and everything goes on rails and we were able to work out the details and do some minor tweaks to have it look good up there in the sky.

The next day the wind picked up and things got more demanding. The kites flew faster allowing less time to fix minor mishaps, but by changing kites, we were able to continue flying, still making it look good. We put up a wind meter to measure the wind speed and it said about 9 to 13 m/sec.

We have never been able to fly a routine from start to finish anytime earlier in these conditions, but now, we made it happen! Such a revelation! It was so fulfilling to really get that routine working even if the wind really put us to the test! The Nirvana High Winds, sometimes by adding a diaper stood up to it and made our performances look more than satisfactory.

Here are some team flying videos to prove what I’m talking about!