FreeWing Air Team

With wing design leveling out a little in the last year or so, it’s good to see brands like FreeWing thinking outside the box and pushing forward with new material implementation, with the fragility of most wings made from standard materials being one of the bigger issues, particularly on such an expensive product. The FreeWing Air Team looks to rectify this by employing a Ho’okipa airframe (which has been proven as a robust and stiff product previously) and, more significantly, an all-new canopy material dubbed Ultra X, promising to be lightweight (86GSM) low stretch, and including a laminated PE mesh designed to take a kicking. Sizes range from a 3m through to 6m in half meter increments.

The handle interface is neatly modularized on the Air Team, with lightweight aluminum handles as standard bolting on and off with a simple Torx bolt each end. These can also be replaced with soft webbing for a more forgiving feel. Unusually the nose handle also has this capability built in, so plenty of customization is available.

The Ho’okipa cloth, combined with a new closing seam, can tolerate some serious inflation pressure with the leading edge requiring 16PSI on our test model, making for an extremely stiff airframe. The Boston valves make it relatively easy to achieve the high-inflation pressure. The age-old compromise on a more robust product is of course weight, but in the case of the FreeWing Air, the increased canopy weight is offset by the light tube material. We were intrigued as to what this actually equated to, so got the scales out – our 4.5m weighs in at 2.75kg which probably sits 200-300g over your average hard-handled wing of that square meterage made from standard ripstop and Dacron – not a big difference considering the durability increase.

In performance terms we found the Air Team liked a little power, with the mid level of canopy tension liking to be filled to pump against. The level of dihedral isn’t massive, presenting a decent amount of sail area to the wind per size and once on foil pulled forward in an efficient and assertive manner. The wingtips have been thinned out enhancing that forward drive and it certainly rambles upwind well. The wing flags obediently, with no side-to-side oscillation, and the balanced fore aft weight distribution means the strut tip doesn’t drop out, which is impressive considering the more robust materials employed; what we did notice is a little vibration from that looser canopy but nothing too drastic as the material is intrinsically stiff. The rigid airframe, canopy and handles combine to provide an impressive amount of loft when jumping for minimal sheeting effort, and as you’d expect there’s very little deformation of the structure when you’re hanging from it. Through transitions the handling is light and easy to rotate through technical maneuvers; the hard handles aid this, but we felt the agility was more about the sail shape than the interface.

The Air Team is a wing that’s going to have a long product life, and isn’t going to bag out, even with the most aggressive of high-wind floggings. When it comes to the crunch, a foil in most circumstances will glance off the Ultra X canopy, where ripstop would almost immediately fail. In more consequential wave conditions, the stronger materials will give you more confidence to go deeper and get rumbled with less chance of trashing your wing. Even in simple situations like paddling through shore break or carrying your rig, you might avoid some trips to the repair shop. In a freestyle context with spinning foils in close proximity to wings on the regular, it’s an absolute no brainer.

It's potentially the most robust wing currently available on the market, no slouch in the performance department, and particularly effective in powered conditions. For those requiring something with punchy power delivery and efficiency, and I hesitate to use the phrase ‘bomb proof’, look no further. Cast your preconceptions of the beefy materials aside, as the Air Team handles far more elegantly than you would expect.