Air 55

The Air 55 is essentially the big brother of the Air 45. However, Riot has made a radical departure from the traditional method of creating different sizes of one shape. The theory behind this is simple. In general purpose play designs, performance is not so specific that the differences in body weight and size have much more effect than needing a larger version of the same design. The Air however is a performance machine. Larger paddlers have more weight to throw around, they have more inertia, have a harder time getting the boat to take off, go deeper when they land, even when flat, sink the rails further into the water and so on. As a result, the Air 55, while targeted to give the 190lbs paddler the exact same performance as the Air 45 does to the 140lbs paddler, has several design differences to its smaller brother. Performance is the same, shape is not.

The easiest difference to notice at a glance is that the Air 55 has two stingers in the stern, not just one. This is primarally to offer more efficient and faster release both while flat and on edge for larger paddlers who sink the rail deeper. Secondly, it has allowed us to widen the stern significantly, offering support to the stern while surfing and thus making it much faster than any other boat of this size (and even longer), without effecting the bounce (keeping the ability to drive the stern down on command despite its "width"). The water sees the width of the boat at the stingers while surfing, but the paddler can easily overcome this by forcing the narrow parts of the stern in between the stingers for bounce.

The wide portion of the kayak in the centre is slightly more pronounced and wider than the Air 45, and is carried further to the nose proportional to the carving rail than on the Air 45. Again, this is for acceleration on defined carving on waves, and for retentive volume both in holes and in landing big tricks on waves.

This is an earlier prototype, but it gives you an idea of the volume of the 55. The centre of the Air is packed with volume as you can see. High knees allows us to bring the feet back from the tips, thereby maintaining radical volume transitions and slicy ends for flatwater cartwheeling and hole tricks, and retain comfort even for those giants out there. Radically lifted carving rail (like the Booster) makes this kayak ultra forgiving, despite having an almost 90 degree carving rail that will hold anywhere on anything. Since this proto, we have increased stern volume behind the seat, softened the bow side wall, increases centre volume in the centre of the kayak at the seamline, and increased comfort.

What separates this kayak from all the other Short boats out there is its speed and handling. While it is as forgiving, if not more so, than all the butt-bouncers out there, it has a carving rail that is startling and pleasing. This kayak will surf waves with ease that our competitors most wave specific boats won't even catch, carve into places that no other short kayak can go, and most importantly, air on anything bigger, faster and more spectacularilly that any other kayak.

Our top heavy weight pro's have been using this boat. Javid Grubbs got "ride of the day" in the hole riding competition at the Canadian and US team trials.

The week before Steve Fisher got by far the biggest and most consistent airs and tricks at the wave surfing portion of the wave event, and Rob "Air loop" Cartwight swears it air loops better than his darling Disco. And that was in an early prototype. Wait until you hear about what they're doing in the new ones!

Air 45 has performance from about 100lbs to 190lbs with peak range in 120lbs to 175lbs, and the Air 55 performance range is 150lbs to about 240lbs with the peak range in the 165lbs to 220lbs (and when I mean peak, I 'm getting silly because the "performance range" I give is the REAL PERFORMANCE range of the boat)

(Obviously, different style and likes-dislikes being part of that... some 240 lbs people will love the 45 and some 100lbs people will love the 55... it all just depends on what YOU like).

On another note, I have a special little surpise for you, that I can't say too much about, but the Airs will come with no less than THREE different fin systems. Stand by!