 The Revolution sport kite was released at the 1989 KTA kite trade show in San Diego, California (our home town). The kite was in development for about two years prior to that.
Rev Up to Bristol
Rev Up to Uchinada
Join the Drachen Foundation and Revolution Kites as we celebrate the 20th Anniversary of 4 line Revolution Kite Flying
Join us in Bristol to: Light the candles of the 20th Anniversary cake. |
 Bring your Rev to fly and receive an iron on embroidered 20th Anniversary Rev Patch and anniversary sticker |
 Watch the Masterpiece Series of Scott Skinner, Jose Sainz, Jon Burkhardt, Barry Poulter, Randy Tom, Ron Gibian come together and fly.
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 Be ready to bid on the only Masterpiece Series Rev by kite artist Martin Lester! Commissioned by the Drachen Foundation, all proceeds go to the Bristol Kite Festival |
The development of the Revolution design began in 1987. I had recently moved back to San Diego from Santa Barbara, California, after completing a degree in mechanical engineering and working with an engineering firm there. Driving by the San Diego Bay one afternoon, I noticed a big, husky guy flying a kite and being dragged across the park! I was so fascinated that I looked into this new sport. I soon found out that the best kites cost in the range of $200 to $300. I quickly enlisted the fun loving company of my two brothers Jim and David. Within two weeks we had designed and built our own set of power dragging kites! For the next several weeks, we spent our afternoons experimenting with this new hobby of ours. After getting the basic controls of two-line flying down, we flew team maneuvers, then we flew our delta kites with long flowing tails, then we stacked the kites. Then we got kind of bored.
I'm always looking for ways to improve things, and it seemed to me this kite could use some improving. Primarily, better landing abilities. My idea was to modify the kite so that it could back down and land. Over the next several months we tested multiple approaches to effect a "backing down" or reversing action, including four line control, three line control, appropriate handle design, and mechanical flap designs among other design concepts. Although the initial attempts quickly affected the general performance of the kite, the ability to reverse down and land was not much closer. As we worked harder and harder to fine-tune the design, the effects were becoming less and less noticeable. After about six months of design modifications to the basic delta design, we gave up in frustration.
Several months later I woke up with a completely new approach to the design problem. I decided to approach the kite from an airplane control perspective as opposed to a kite approach. By controlling each wing independently from a flap or aileron design, we could redirect airflow to cause forward or reverse flight. Within two weeks we had a working model that far surpassed our wildest dreams! Far beyond our main goal of having a kite able to back down and land, this new revolutionary kite was capable of instantaneous stopping, reverse flight in any direction, full speed control in both forward and reverse flight, and propeller like spins! The most impressive fact was that these characteristics are inherent to the basic design, and therefore do not require hours and hours to learn complicated techniques. Although accurate control takes practice, backing down to land takes nothing more than a simple rotation of both wrists!
Since the initial design of the Revolution I had a nine-foot wingspan, structural integrity quickly became an issue. Fiberglass was too flexible and heavy. The high stiffness aluminum used in the arrow shaft industry worked well but began to bend its shape within an hour or so of flying. My younger brother David just happened to be a pro rated golfer with a lot of connections in the golf industry—including access to the graphite shaft design team at Aldila, who at the time was the world’s leading graphite golf shaft manufacturer. Within six weeks or so we had designed the ideal shaft for our Rev I (Neos Omega) kite. With parts for 200 kites and two days until the international kite trade show in San Diego, Aldila gave us the bad news that they wouldn't be able to manufacture our shafts for us due to other production obligations.
However, the Revolution design was an instant showstopper at the convention, selling out in the first hour, and following with orders for 400 more! We had a wall of people, three deep for three days placing orders.
On Saturday, the kite demonstration day, we had store retailers crowded around with three to six kites under each arm waiting for a lesson. The idea was that with this information, they would be able to go back to their stores and amaze all their customers, therefore selling thousands of kites. This was wrong! We gave people the basic lesson—telling them, thumbs back flies the kite up, left thumb forward turns left, right thumb turns right. Both thumbs forward backs the kite down. The fact that this method of flying was completely alien to them (no pulling motions), along with the highly sensitive controllability, made the Revolution overwhelming. The fact that we had virtually no experience teaching people to fly added to the confusion. It seemed so easy to us. Thumbs back. Left thumb, right thumb, thumbs forward!!
Although selling the kites complete with a training video was the original plan, it had been dropped due to advice from store retailers that the cost would be prohibitive. The stores had demonstration videos showing performance, but no technique. Only hard-core enthusiasts would dare accept the Revolution challenge! After a couple months of frustration from new Revolution fliers and retailers, we began including the training videos with each Revolution sold. We instantly noticed the difference; new fliers that used to take two weeks to get the basics would now buy the Revolution, watch the training video that night, and learn the basic flying skills by the next day! Over the next couple years, my brother Jim was successful in incorporating quad line flying into international competitions including precision, ballet and team events. From the beginning and through the present virtually all quad line events are dominated by the Revolution design.
The original Revolution I design is extremely stable and is the choice for large stacks but is considered slow by today's standards. The Rev II is fast and somewhat "twitchy". I enjoy it most in high winds (12 mph and above) on a 100-foot line set, which makes the flying fast and furious! Forget precision! The Rev 1.5 is by far the favorite of both competition fliers and recreational fliers alike. With a wingspan of 7.5 feet, it has great stability similar to the 9-foot Rev I with a lot of the instant quickness of the 6-foot Rev II. The Speed Series, which debuted in 1998, introduced a new aspect to the Revolution design. With the 4-strut support of the tighter sail, the Revolution Shockwave and Supersonic reach speeds up to 70 mph! That's twice the speed of a standard Rev 1.5! In fact, the Speed Series can fly faster backward than a 1.5 can fly forward!
In 2001 we introduced the Revolution Blast. With a wingspan of 9.5 feet and a longer chord, this design resulted in significant power and improved stability over the standard Speed Series design. In 2003 we introduced the Power Blast 2-4 (originally the Super Blast). With approximately 30% more sail area, this is a true buggy kite in winds above 12 mph. The up wind performance is unbelievable! One of the greatest advantages of all the Speed Series kites is the ability to instantly dump 90% of the power by simply rolling the thumbs back! This is extremely useful in all power kiting conditions.
The Revolution Kite’s 20th Anniversary: Highlights
Joe Hadzicki
After 20 years of Revolution Kites, Ali Fujino at the Drachen Foundation has asked me to look back and recount some of the highlights.
We all have memories of kite flying when we were kids, but instead of buying my first kite for $1.50 and seeing how many spools of string I could let out before losing it in the clouds, my first kite started at the dining room table. When I was around 8 years old, my family (three boys, three girls, three left handers, three right) sat around the dining room table with my aunt, and we built diamond kites out of paper bags, complete with tails made with a string of rag cloth bows.
It was late in the evening when we finished. My brothers and sisters went to watch TV, but I was so excited to test my new creation that I took it out and ran down the middle of the street and flew it under the moonlit sky. Looking back on it now, I can still feel the visceral sensations of my first kiting experience. The cool evening air, the magically lit road becoming my personal test runway, the shadows of the neighborhood watching my experiment unfold.
I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since I always loved to create things, I knew early on that engineering was the discipline for me. During my senior year, a guest lecturer gave a presentation on car crash equipment he had designed and built for the Ford Motor Company. Talking about how “drunks off the street” were used in the original crash tests, I knew this guy was a rogue maverick of an engineer. I promptly followed him out of the lecture hall and asked for a job. The following Monday, I was knee deep in military computer programs, sheet metal retrofits on trailers, stainless steel plumbing for jet engine starters, and vacuum forming plastic fairings for underwater sonar towing. This guy was nuts and I loved it. But some of the most influential experiences came in the off hours. We would spend hours and hours reverse engineering and building WWII fighter aircraft models from pictures out of books. I mean from scratch! Then we would bolt a motor in and throw them – crash them – rebuild – adjust – and throw them again. I developed a certain sense for subtle control of aircraft using control surfaces. Now THIS truly influenced my later kite designs.
One weekend traveling down to San Diego to visit my family, I was stunned to see from the freeway a large man being pulled across the park by an incredibly powerful kite! (I believe this was Don Tabor of Top of the Line Kites.) I said to myself, “Now THAT’S what I call a kite!” I spent the weekend building and flying my first delta kites. Since it was a dream of mine to work for myself since I was a little kid, I thought it would be a good idea to take some time off to see if I could get something started. Little did I know that this would be the beginning of Revolution Kites.
After playing with deltas for a few weeks, flying, stacking, team flying with my brothers, I felt a need for more control. I tried various wing shapes, adding more control lines, and even hinged control surfaces, and even though I was having some limited success, it wasn’t what I was looking for. My vision was a kite that you could stop at any point in the sky, then back down with total control, and land – like the Harrier Jump Jet. That was my vision, and I’m big on visions. That’s what drives my passion.
Several months into experimenting (build the kite in the morning, fly it in the afternoon, wrestle with the results that evening, and come up with design changes for the next day’s attempt), I found I had hit a wall. I had run out of ideas.
Then one day, by chance, I was on the phone with my old boss in Santa Barbara, tying up some paperwork on an old project. Although our conversation had nothing to do with engineering or design, it somehow changed my state of mind. The next morning I opened my eyes and sat up in bed and said to myself, “That’s it! I need two independently controllable wings, just like an airplane!” This was the “Aha!” moment that changed everything.
The concept worked on the first prototype: two squares of fabric separated by an empty space. From then on it was the daily routine of building in the morning, flying in the afternoon, and re-designing in the evening for the next day’s build.
At this point I felt the hard work was done. We had made the leap to a conceptually new design, radically different than the current trends. We took eighty kites to the 1989 international kite trade show in San Diego. The Revolution design was an instant show stopper at the convention, selling out in the first hour, followed with orders for 400 more! We had a wall of people, three deep for three days placing orders.
But now we had a new kind of challenge before us – meeting demand. Things were crazy at our “headquarters” (AKA our parents’ garage). We enlisted everyone we knew to help us with production. We managed to get a golf club manufacturer to make our shafts, and a sail company to sell us rip-stop material and provide us with sewers. We did all the kite assembly, packaging, and shipping ourselves. As we sold more kites, we were able to hire people to work for us and to rent a production facility. I think my mother and father were a bit sad to see us go as they worked with us in the shop for many years after we moved. My dad made a lot of handles and tied a lot of bridles!
During that first year, we cleaned up the design, streamlined production, developed our graphite structure, filed for a patent, and started our company.
Once we had a kite that could be made efficiently, we had to concentrate on making it more accessible to the average person. Although selling the kites complete with a training video was the original plan, it had been dropped due to advice from store retailers that the cost would be prohibitive. After a couple months of frustration from new Revolution fliers and retailers, we began including the training videos with each Revolution sold. (This was the first time in history for stunt kites to come complete with training videos!) We instantly noticed the difference! New fliers that used to take two weeks to get the basics would now buy the Revolution, watch the training video that night, and learn the basic flying skills by the next day!
Revolution has always been a family affair. Both my brothers, Dave and Jim, were key to the company. Revolution Kites would have been much less successful, maybe even impossible, without them. The actual business structure of the company is virtually Jim’s creation. With a business degree from USC, he had the skill set to do the nuts and bolts of the company. Both Jim and Dave spent countless hours test flying. Jim spent a lot of time just flying for fun, whereas I was more on a mission. After the company was started, Jim was very successful during the early years incorporating quad line flying into the international competitions, including precision, ballet, and team events. From the beginning and through to the present, virtually all quad line events are dominated by the Revolution design.
In the early days, Revolution kites were only allowed to compete in the Innovative classification. The four line control system and the independently controlled wings make the Revolution so precise that it is virtually impossible to compare it to a two line delta design. But a mistake was made one time when we were invited to a kite competition in Reno, Nevada. The event was sponsored by the local casinos and the competition was open to all comers. My two brothers and I promptly competed against the rest of the field which consisted of delta teams. We flew a knot tying demonstration, which is simple for a Revolution kite, and walked away, hands down, with the $1,000 first place prize. Needless to say, that was the first and last time we were allowed to compete against dual line kites.
My brother, Dave, was a registered golf pro at the time, and his connections in the golf industry set up the graphite R&D with the world’s leading golf shaft manufacturers that, over a six month period, developed the bullet-proof Revolution shafts that are the cornerstone of Revolution’s infamous durability. Before the graphite structure was developed, I built the prototypes using “70 series” aluminum arrow shafts. Although this material is stiff enough to use in a Revolution test, it soon bends and becomes useless. This is a classic difference between building for fun and building for production. The graphite was critical to our Revolution’s success. This also led to one of our patents in the golf industry for our computer controlled golf shaft machine. In fact, the company that helped developed our original Rev I shaft over 20 years ago now produces its golf shafts using our machines.
As the company grew, we brought in our sister, Lolly, to run the front office. She has been a great point of contact with all of our distributors – she’s become well known in kite circles on and off the field.
We also welcomed Ben D’Antonio to our team as the general manager of kites. He’s been instrumental in the Masterpiece Series and helps keep all of our fliers happy and in-the-know.
We have continued to add to our product line as a result of our experience in graphite. We’ve made bicycle components, model airplane parts, canes for the blind, and military components. Maybe nearest to my heart after kites is our Revolution Skateboard. After all these years, I’m still skateboarding every weekend – not bad for a guy who’s nearly fifty!
The Revolution Kite’s 20th Anniversary: Dream Becomes a Reality
Ben D’Antonio
Revolution took its 20th birthday to the UK to be a part of the kiting scene in Europe, and what a birthday it was, and even more, what a way to have a birthday party. Myself and team iQuad and even Joe Hadzicki took off for this once in a lifetime event and congregation of Rev fliers.
The first stop on the European tour was Portsmouth, England, where we took to the field as both a company and as a group of many nations and beliefs to fly Revolution kites. In attendance were no less than 8 to 10 teams of the very best fliers in the world from at least six different countries.
We left all the nonsense and personal differences behind and met together to just fly a kite that has given so many of us such great pleasure over the last 20 years, and to tell and show Joe H. what started as a dream is so much more 20 years later.
In Portsmouth we battled weather, wind, and even each other at times to put on the show of a lifetime and fly in sync together with a massive group of fliers, and then to put on the “Biggest Mega Fly Ever” that really did some flying rather than just going up and then down.
After hours of lessons and demos by each team, we came to the line not as any single team but as the largest team ever with only the very best of the best. Set aside was this team or that team. What we had become was the “Revolution Team,” and as an added bonus we even had the man who started all this with just a dream and a hope, Mr. Joe Hadzicki.
When you were on the line you could hear the moves called in English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish. That is when I was finally able to be a part of my own personal dream of “one sky, one world and all joined together with kite lines.” All the hard work of helping to put this together was right there in front of me for the whole world to see. There were 47 fliers all together going thru patterns being called.
The thing that sticks in my mind is when I set my kite down and then walked away to look at it all. The tears came to my eyes when I thought of all the people who made my dream possible – people like Ali Fujino and Scott Skinner of the Drachen Foundation; Team iQuad, who kept me going when I just wanted to give up; all the other teams, who believed in someone they really didn’t even know; Revolution, who saw the dream and knew I could pull it off; and Mary Shaffer, who passed away just a few weeks before this all took place, who no matter what wanted me to be happy and live out my dreams. At this point I had to walk away with a tear in my eye and look up at the sky and know that the heavens were looking down and smiling.
From there it was off to the second part of the tour in Bristol where the winds were not what we would have liked but the fliers never stopped, no matter what the conditions were. Once again Team Revolution pulled it off and gave a great show. At one time we were over 50 fliers going through routines, and even though the winds were light, we as a group had fun and were able to strut our stuff for the people.
What really sticks in my mind was looking over and seeing Joe Hadzicki flying with his daughter and son, and thinking to myself how this sport is such a family sport. It makes no difference if you’re young or old, or from here or there. It’s just about having fun with what you’re doing.
For me, this was so very much more than a kite event. This was about putting lots of different people together in a place where we can all be together, leave all of the world behind, and just enjoy each other’s company, where we can fly as one rather than as small groups. In my mind, this is what the world lacks in so many areas. We as a people have forgotten that the person next to you is your brother, not someone you’re in competition with for some prize. We were in fact a world of many nations all joined together by kite lines, just enjoying each other’s company.
There are so many people that made this possible that to thank everyone would take up way too much space as well as time, but there are several people that must be mentioned and these folks were prime examples of what all this was about. They are: Felix Mottram of the Decorators, Steven Hoath of the Flying Squad, and mostly Ali Fujino and Scott Skinner, and the most important, my friend as well as boss, Joe Hadzicki, thank you all from the bottom of my heart. |
