A Brief History Of The Aerial ft. Bruce Irons, Christian & Nate Fletcher And More

We’ve all seen an air. We know exactly what one looks like. There’s no point describing, visually.

Yet pointing one out and doing an air are very different things — it’s what separates the elite from the masses. In his Stab Book of Hot Surfing, Taj Burrow wrote, “You may never do an air in your life and you can still be one of the most experienced and best surfers on Earth.”

Furthering his attempts at educating audiences without resorting to dumbed-down tutorials or using surfskates (I’ll go rinse my mouth now) as props, Dylan Graves flew north from his adopted Gold Coast home to Japan, where many of the world’s most capable above-the-lip surfers convened for Stab High’s second edition at Shizunami.

His initial inquiry into what constitutes an air drew responses ranging from the literal (Stab’s own Garrett James gestured broadly at the space around him) to the philosophical: “An air is when there’s nothing between you and the ground,” offered Stab High Japan 2024 winner Eithan Osborne.

From there, Dylan catalogued some of the most influential airs ever done with help from participants and judges. Their answers revealed influences and, unsurprisingly, the reasons why some of them surf the way they do. 

Harry Bryant rates Christian Fletcher’s boned-out Pipe throwaway, while Lee Wilson pointed to Pedro Barros’s indy in a Brazilian wave tank. Pedro, in turn, throws it back to Bruce Irons’ big, stylish frontside grabs from the era when he and his brother more or less owned surfing. Hughie Vaughan (Stab High Japan 2025 winner) tipped his hat to Flynn Novak, and Chippa Wilson leaned toward Joe Crimo’s mid-’90s trickery. The list is extensive but worth following.

Dylan dug deeper into the subjectivity of airs, their origins, their history, and their natural evolution. It all traces back to the first air possibly ever done by Kevin Reed, who first did them over four wheels before bringing them into the ocean and onto the cover of Surfer in 1974, even if he didn’t quite land that one.

Matt Kechele, the Floridian who also shaped boards for a young Kelly Slater, is credited with landing the first completed air ever documented on film. In retrospect, it looks more like an ollie, but it opened the door to an entire dimension that had, until then, been virtually unexplored in surfing.

“That footage of Kech landing the first air has never been published anywhere,” Dylan told Stab. “I sent this to Bruce Walker [East Coast surfing legend] to fact-check the timeline, and he said, ‘I have footage of Kech in 1979 landing one,’ and I couldn’t find anything that beat that. Kind of crazy.”

Dylan credits Taj Burrow with elevating the form to new heights at the end of the ’90s, before Bruce and Andy Irons joined him in taking over the airspace in the early 2000s. In his particular and expressive way, Ozzy Wright announced his arrival, offending people as much as Christian Fletcher had two decades prior. Oz’s approach, frenetically pumping as he got to his feet to launch himself repeatedly left and right and onto swimming pool rails and rock formations, had magazines and the jaded statesmen of surfing calling him a one-trick pony. Ozzy persisted.

A generation soon grew up viewing airs as fundamental, as foundational as a bottom turn or re-entry. Wade Goodall made a name for himself in Passion Pop shortly before the Dane/Jordy/Mod Coll era. The rest is history, but also present, and most definitely the future.

As a fellow Stab High Japan judge, Dylan couldn’t help but pester Lee Wilson about absolute refusal to grab a pair of rails in flight — or to rate them at all. It’s a principle that arguably cost Brazilian Arthur Vilar his Shizunami win. Controversial? Yes. But possibly progressive, and maybe a necessary shedding of one training wheel that could signal the beginning of the end of double-grab airs. Without him, would we have seen Mikey Wright, Matt Meola, and Hughie and Joel Vaughan landing single-handed flips in 2025? Probs not.

Essential viewing for aerialists and anyone who appreciates very good surfing happening above the lip.