The french standard for kitesurf safety

Version française     back to home page

What is AFNOR?

AFNOR (Association Française de NORmalisation) is the french institute for standards, like the german DIN or the american ANSI. All these institutes work together to issue international standards in the ISO (Interational Standard Organisation).

Why a standard?

After serious accidents due to non-working safety systems, the French federation (FFVL) started a project of an AFNOR standard for kitesurf safety system. A safety system is used to stop or reduce enough the power of the kite in case of emergency.

Apparently France is the first country working on a official standard, made by a national standard agency.

Important participants

The french federation of kitesurf (FFVL), national french sailing school, national group of nautic industry, Neil Pryde (Cabrinha), Naish, Wichard and others

The project

Here is the translation of the introduction:

The safety of the kiterider needs kite power control.

In lost of control situations, it is mandatory to be able of cancelling or signifiacntly reducing the pull effort of the kite at the central hooking point, in a realeasing time fixed by the standard, in order to come back to a safety situation.

One must keep a link to the kite (leash) to avoid to hurt other people by loosing the kite.

In a second phase if after this reduction or stop of the pulling effort, the rider is still in danger, he must be able to release completely the kite.

The scope of the standard is deliberately restricted and covers only the operation of the safety system between the hooking on the rider and the first releasable elements after the release system.

If you understand french, you can read here the whole content of the project.

• on the AFNOR web site , but you need to register,
• on the forum du CNK, Comité National du Kite de la FFVL
• or simply here.

You can participate!

I'm helping the French federation to gather comments of all kitesurfers about the project, in order to enhance the document.
See the current synthesis of the comments (in french)

Your comments are welcome on my forum/guestbook. If you are able to comment in french, please do so directly on the forum du CNK

In particular, I'd like to know if you are aware of such a work in your country.

An important debate we have about the safety system standard is about unwanted releases of the safety system.

This is not precisely described in the standard project and we want to enhnace it, by suggesting proper test:

What are your experiences of unwanted releases?
How would test a safety system to check that it will not release unwillingly?

This site was visited   times and this page  times