Parawing

A pocket-sized soft kite that gets you foiling, then gets packed away

20 boards · 6 brands · 106 sizes

A parawing is a small, soft, strut-less wing on very short lines with a short control bar, flown like a miniature kite. Riders use it to get up on a foil and work upwind, then roll it up and stow it on a waist belt to ride open-ocean bumps hands-free. Most riders use it for downwinding, and it came out of Maui's downwind crowd in 2024.

A typical parawing board, 1829 by 514 mm
the typical outline: every board’s shape averaged at the median length and width

The typical board

The typical parawing board is 1829 × 521 mm, 90 L, with a round tail and its wide point ahead of centre.

1651–2184mm long · median 1829

470–584mm wide · median 521

60–120litres · median 90

3.5length over width, median · derived

Ranges hold the middle 80 % of every size listed · tails: round tail 9, square tail 5, rounded pin tail 4, pin tail 2

How It Rides

What moves it

The parawing is a ram-air or single-skin parafoil with no inflatable tube, held by a short bar close to the body. Its pull drives the board until the hydrofoil lifts it, just as a wing does. Once on foil the rider can collapse and stow it and let swell energy carry the board, then pull it out again to get back upwind. It has no depower system, so its usable wind range is narrower than an inflatable wing's.

Reading the shape

Parawingers mostly ride mid-length boards, which sit between compact wing boards and long downwind boards. They are longer and narrower than a wing board so they glide and get onto foil early, but they are short enough to handle with a small kite in hand. A French shop guide recommends a mid-length hybrid with volume equal to body weight in kilograms, or 10–15 L more, for learning. Because the rider stows the wing and glides, these boards look more like downwind boards than wing boards in the drawings.

How to read any board: length and width, wide point, tails, rails, rocker

Wind

about 15–20 kn to learn; usable range narrower than a wing's

Water

open-ocean swell and wind bumps, flat water for practice

Worth knowing

With no depower, a 3–4 kn lull makes take-off very hard.

The Rack

Every parawing board, shortest to longest, one scale · from the Slingshot Flow Craft V2 (1549 mm) to the Cabrinha Quest 2026 (2286 mm)

All 20 in the catalogue

Good To Know

  1. BRM's Maliko 2 parawing in 4.1 m² weighs 418 g, and the smallest 2.2 m² size weighs 310 g. The control is a 25 cm carbon bar, which is why the whole thing fits in a waist pack. [1]

  2. Greg Drexler, who designed the Maliko, raced on the Kiteboarding World Tour (4th in 2001) and spent about ten years as a designer at Naish. He started Boardriding Maui in 2012 with a strut-less kite called the Cloud, more than a decade before parawings. [2]

  3. Because a parawing has no inflated leading-edge tube, it cannot be punctured, which matters miles offshore. Riders also find it more aerodynamically efficient than an inflatable wing, since a fat round tube is a poor shape for lift. [3]

  4. Before the term existed, Maui riders were already using parachutes. Sam Reynolds made 'Pocket Wings' and Cynbad tried model-rocket parachutes to get up on downwind foils. [3]

  5. The first Downwind Parawing World Cup was held at Leucate, France, on 22–26 April 2026, less than two years after the Maliko launched. Thirty men and nine women raced, and Tom Pansard and Manon Dupe (both FRA) won. [4][5]

Watch And Read

Who Makes Them

Where And When

Where to watch it

  • Maui North Shore (Maliko to Kahului), HawaiiThe parawing was developed here by downwinders who wanted to skip the paddle-up and the car shuttle.
  • Leucate, FranceIt hosted the first Downwind Parawing World Cup in April 2026.

Where it came from

The idea came from Maui's North Shore downwinders. Around 2023 Sam Reynolds of Five-O Windsports sold a small, stowable 'Pocket Wing', and Cynthia 'Cynbad' Brown experimented with model-rocket parachutes. Greg Drexler of Boardriding Maui released the Maliko in August 2024, the first parawing that could go properly upwind. Within months most major brands had their own models.

More disciplines

Sources

  1. [1]

    BRM Maliko 2 Parawing

    Wingfoil Pro Center · tier 3 · manufacturer

  2. [2]

    About BRM - Greg Drexler

    Boardriding Maui · tier 1 · manufacturer

  3. [3]

    New Sensation: Exploring the Birth of the Parawing

    Foiling Magazine (Issue 23, Bowen Dwelle), 2024 · tier 2 · article

  4. [4]

    Mondial du Vent, Leucate 2026: First-ever Downwind Parawing World Cup

    Surf Foil World Tour, 2026-04-28 · tier 1 · federation

  5. [5]

    Parawing Downwind Racing Gets World Cup Status in 2026

    SUPboarder Magazine, 2026-04-02 · tier 2 · article

  6. [6]

    Parawing Foiling Trend on Maui - Is this the future

    Stand Up Magazin, 2024-08-21 · tier 2 · article

  7. [7]

    The Parawing: A Beginner's Guide

    30 Noeuds · tier 3 · manufacturer