Wing · Prehistory
2011
The first Slingwing
Slingshot co-founder Tony Logosz builds hand-held wing prototypes, years before the market is ready for them.
Slingwing
Tony Logosz's first wing prototypes, 2011
Tony Logosz, co-founder and designer of the kite brand Slingshot, built his first hand-held wing prototypes in 2011. These were the first Slingwings. The concept was inspired by Magruder’s Wind Weapon and, more recently, by the Kitewing, used on frozen lakes.
The prototypes were ahead of their time, and they ended up in a closet.
Sources disagree on the details of those first years. One puts the prototypes on a windfoil board with a large foil in the Columbia River Gorge from the start; another says the foil test came only in 2015; a third shows Logosz with the first prototype at Hood River in 2015.
When Slingshot finally sold the Slingwing in the summer of 2019, it was a single-strut inflatable wing, one of the first wings on the market.