Flare Line

You can only order the Line directly from go-Flare.com, not from us. Ask us for a 5% discount code. 

Our opinion: Flare Line

Since we developed the Line together with Flare, we might be a little biased:-) The Moustache has changed soaring forever, the line will change speedflying. The Line makes proxy flying easier and safer. It converts speed into lift much better than any classic speedwing out there. Also it has more glide than any other speedwing. And it’s faster than anything else. It’s the fastest wing on the planet. The 13 has the speed and the dive of a classic 9m wing. We also fly the 9 next to Arc 6 with trimmer stitching undone and the angle and speed was the same. It’s unreal! You have to try it, it’s hard to believe. If you like speed, this wing is for you!

Flare Line for Speedriding

An ideal speedriding wing lets you control the glider while skiing, without making lift, so you can stay on the skis and not get lifted off accidentally. The Flare system makes the opposite. You create lift while steering. That’s why the line is not ideal for riding steep terrain, especially when you don’t have much space. However if you have big open faces where you can do bigger turns, you will like the line for riding in smaller sizes, since you can control the amount of lift much more precise and it doesn’t slow you down as much as a speedriding wing do. You can ride really fast, even when it’s a little bumpy and just keep your hands up and trust the reflex. As long as your hands up, the line is quite stable above your head, even when lines go slack.

Passive Safety

We tested the Line during many flights and never got a collapse. It is collapse stable enough to fly in conditions where speedflying is still fun. But because we only limited experiences with collapses midair, we really don’t recommend flying the Line in nasty conditions. We expect the Line to react more like small paragliders to asymmetrics, meaning it will probably turn away and put you in a dive. If you should ever get a collapse, we strongly recommend a symmetric pump on both toggles. This will counter steer and help to pump open the collapsed side. We do expect the Line to be a little less collapse resistant than the Moustache. But that’s just a guess for now.

Active safety

Many pilots find it very easy to fly active with the flare system on the Moustache, since one needs to pull the toggles anyway. We think on the Line it’s similar. However because the Line has less aspect ratio and more “speedbartravel” than the Moustache, the total brake travel is quite long. So it’s important to move your hands a lot to fly very active, it’s not like flying a 2-Liner with B-Handles where you only need to pull 10cm max. If you fly the Line very active, you can fly trough really rough air without getting collapses.

Flying in turbulence

Speed is your friend when it comes to proxy flying. Speed means lift. Lift is safety when close to the ground. But speed is not your friend when it come to collapses. All the wings we have flown collapse more aggressive when flying faster. This will be also true for the Line. So when you hit strong turbulence, pull the toggles to the neutral setting (bottom of risers) and fly active down there. This makes it less likely to get a collapse and when you do get one, it will be smaller, reopen quicker and the reaction will be much more gentle. The Line has so much “speedbartravel” that even the B’s lines go completely slack when flying hands up. That means you are not “connected” to your wing with your toggles anymore, you get zero feedback over the toggles. So it’s much harder to fly active and delayed. We recommend to only go fully hands up in calm air.

Max glide of the Line

You will be surprised how well you can still glide with your Line. As always there is a big difference from a 15 to an 8… Since the size 8,9,10 have only aspect ratio 4.0 and 11 has 4.1, 13 has 4.2 and 15 4.4 this effect is slightly increased. If you have 80kg tow and fly without skis, you make yourself really small to reduce drag, we think you can reach roughly the following glide ratios:

Size – Glide Ratio
15 – 7
13 – 6.6
11 – 6.2
10 – 5.8
9 – 5.4
8 – 5

The max glide surely depends on your weight also. Expect roughly 10% decrease for 10kg more weight. Stretching your legs straight out and leaning back a lot with your upper body has proven to be the most effective position.

Max. Speed you can expect

This depends obviously from many different factors, mainly wingload, body position (drag) and altitude you are flying. On thing we realized is when you fly in best glide and go hands all the way up, your wing picks up so much speed that it goes past the the equilibrium point first before it settles down. So you reach an overspeed first and then slow down again around 10km/h. We think it’s because the wing transforms some sinkspeed into horizontal speed. This numbers here are just to give you a rough idea how much horizontal speed you get when flying a Line with 85 kg tow, without skis on 2000m with a good body position.

15 – 75 km/h
13 – 80 km/h
11 – 85 km/h
10 – 90 km/h
9 – 95 km/h
8 – 95 km/h

Flare Line for Soaring

Of course you can soar the Flare Line. However it’s not built for it. To stay in the air, you need to pull the toggles uncomfortably far down. You need to push already with your arms, what makes it quite tiring. Unless you soar in freaking storm and you can have your hands up high…but then you’r gonna worry about turbulence. If you wanna soar it, it sure helps to have a harness with high attachment points for this problem. The Line has so much dive that you can’t fly hands up for more then few seconds when soaring without landing… With the crazy speed of the line you could theoretically soar in winds up to 100km/h or more…however it’s not tested for this. We really do not recommend trying this! Strong wind usually come with strong turbulence as well and the Flare Line is not built to deal with the craziest turbulence out there. So if you decide to soar it in strong wind, make sure to fly active and not go hands up in crazy turbulence. We still enjoy the Moustache more for soaring the the Flare Line, since it has more aspect ratio, more glide and is super solid.

Flare Line for kiting on Skis

The Line is the best wing we have ever kited. It has soooo much depower and is really easy to control. Since lines are slightly longer than on the Moustache, you can also have your wing lower to the ground without dragging the wingtip all the time. The most fun you will have on a hill or on a ridge where you can soar at the same time also. To kill the Line, simply pull the B-Lines as you do on the Moustache. We didn’t put any Killer mushrooms because they suck when speedflying, but it works great without them. We think the Line would be sick kiting it on a frozen lake on ice-skates!

Flying Moustache lines with the Flare Line

We thought many of the Asstograss lines we discovered and flew with the Moustache are gonna be too flat to fly on a line. Surprisingly most of them work really well on the Line. Since you are flying faster on the Line, you can simply swoop those flat sections and use up your speed. We flew for example the backside of Kronplatz (Olang and Ruis Lines) easily with the 11 with 80kg tow and had a lot of fun.

Barrel Rolls

The lines on the Flare Line are rather long for a speedwing, that slows down barrel rolls a little bit. Even thought a 13m Line flies as fast a 9m Mirage/Rapido, the 13 Line doesn’t feel like a 9m when it comes to barrel rolls. You can’t cheat physics. We find the barrel rolls to be fast and snappy on the small ones when highly loaded, but rather slow on the bigger ones. We chose to make the lines longer on the Flare Line to have more clearance between the wingtip and the grass when flying asstograss. It also dives more in the turns and is more reactive in general with the longer lines we found. All pilots liked the one proto with longer lines better. When highly loaded, the Line is reactive enough to just throw barrel rolls by using weight-shift. The higher up your hands are, the less it reacts to weight-shift. Normal speedwings do the same when opening trimmers…

What we like

• Crazy fast for it’s size
• Very good glide for a speedwing
• Flies very steep when hands up
• Converts speed into lift really well
• Reacts better to weight-shift then the Moustache
• No trimmers needed
• Swoops further than anything else

Good to know

• You need slightly different launch technique
• Barrel rolls feel different, i would say less precise
• Stallspeed and landing-speed is rather high
• We don’t know how it reacts to bigger collapses while flying!
• Not ideal for steep frenchstyle speedriding

Tech details and marketing text

https://go-flare.com/LINE/GFPLI11500