- The patent
- US7140576B2 — Inflatable wing with manifold
- Priority / granted
- February 2003 / November 2006
- Named inventor
- Tony Logosz, alone
- What it replaced
- One valve and one pumping operation per strut
What was the actual problem?
Not engineering. Time, wind and patience.
An inflatable wing arrives at the beach as a folded surface with a rigid-when-pressurised frame inside it. That frame is a leading edge and a set of rib struts running back from it, and every one of those tubes has to reach pressure before the thing is a wing rather than a bag.
Give each tube its own valve and the rigger's job becomes a sequence: find valve, seat pump, pump, close, move on, repeat, and do all of it while the surface you are kneeling on is being pulled sideways by exactly the conditions you came for. Get the order wrong and a half-pressurised frame folds over on itself.
What does making the leading edge a manifold change?
The patent's move is to stop treating the tubes as separate vessels. The leading edge is already the biggest one and it already runs across the whole span, so it becomes the distribution channel: air introduced there travels into every rib strut through connected pathways. One valve, one operation, one pressure.
The second half is the part people forget. Each junction can be closed, which does two jobs at once.
| Separate valves | Leading edge as manifold | |
|---|---|---|
| Operations to rig | One per strut | One, total |
| Pressure across the frame | Whatever each session produced | Equal by construction |
| A puncture in one strut | That strut only, once you find it | Contained by the isolating valve |
| What can go wrong in the wind | The order, every time | Less |
| Rider's first minute | Spent pumping | Spent looking at the water |
Equal pressure matters more than it sounds. A frame is a set of beams sharing a load; a soft one is a beam that is not carrying its share, and the surface deforms around the difference. Consistency of shape between one session and the next depends on the boring fact that the tubes all reached the same number.
Why is it in almost every inflatable wing now?
Because the alternative is indefensible once you have felt it. That is not a legal claim about who licensed what — OXZA has no visibility into Slingshot's licensing and does not assert any — it is an observation about a standard that formed. The patent record is public and so is the date on it.
There is a pattern here with the split strut, filed four months earlier and granted in the same year. Both take something the industry treated as a joining problem and treat it as a structural one instead. The canopy is not laid on the strut, it is part of the span. The struts are not five vessels, they are one volume with valves in it.
Hood Memory Lane is a record of what got built in Hood River before OXZA, told in the past tense because that is where it happened. The dated version is on Tony's timeline, the assignment of these patents is stated plainly on the press page — they belong to Slingshot Sports LLC, not to OXZA — and the current work is the REVSTAR system, where the equivalent question is which joint a rider has to get right and which one the design should get right for them.
Questions
What is the one-pump system on an inflatable wing?
It is a single-point inflation system: the leading edge doubles as a manifold, connected to every rib strut, so one valve fills the whole frame. Valves at each junction can then isolate a strut so the others hold pressure. Tony Logosz filed it in February 2004 with a February 2003 priority and it was granted as US7140576B2 in November 2006.
How were inflatable wings rigged before single-point inflation?
Every strut had its own valve and every strut was pumped separately. On a windy beach that is five or six separate operations on a surface that is already trying to leave, done in an order that matters, before anything else about the session can begin.
Why do the struts need isolating valves at all?
So a failure stays local and pressures stay equal. If a strut is punctured the isolating valve keeps the rest of the frame inflated instead of the whole structure emptying through one hole, and on the fill side it stops the pressure equalising downward to the softest tube.
#patents #inflation #rigging #hoodmemorylane #designhistory
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