Joe Hadzicki

From Discourse-3

After 20 years of Revolution Kites, Ali Fujino at the Drachen Foundation has asked me to look back and recount some of the highlights.

We all have memories of kite flying when we were kids, but instead of buying my first kite for $1.50 and seeing how many spools of string I could let out before losing it in the clouds, my first kite started at the dining room table. When I was around 8 years old, my family (three boys, three girls, three left handers, three right) sat around the dining room table with my aunt, and we built diamond kites out of paper bags, complete with tails made with a string of rag cloth bows.

It was late in the evening when we finished. My brothers and sisters went to watch TV, but I was so excited to test my new creation that I took it out and ran down the middle of the street and flew it under the moonlit sky. Looking back on it now, I can still feel the visceral sensations of my first kiting experience. The cool evening air, the magically lit road becoming my personal test runway, the shadows of the neighborhood watching my experiment unfold.

I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since I always loved to create things, I knew early on that engineering was the discipline for me. During my senior year, a guest lecturer gave a presentation on car crash equipment he had designed and built for the Ford Motor Company. Talking about how “drunks off the street” were used in the original crash tests, I knew this guy was a rogue maverick of an engineer. I promptly followed him out of the lecture hall and asked for a job. The following Monday, I was knee deep in military computer programs, sheet metal retrofits on trailers, stainless steel plumbing for jet engine starters, and vacuum forming plastic fairings for underwater sonar towing. This guy was nuts and I loved it. But some of the most influential experiences came in the off hours. We would spend hours and hours reverse engineering and building WWII fighter aircraft models from pictures out of books. I mean from scratch! Then we would bolt a motor in and throw them – crash them – rebuild – adjust – and throw them again. I developed a certain sense for subtle control of aircraft using control surfaces. Now THIS truly influenced my later kite designs.

One weekend traveling down to San Diego to visit my family, I was stunned to see from the freeway a large man being pulled across the park by an incredibly powerful kite! (I believe this was Don Tabor of Top of the Line Kites.) I said to myself, “Now THAT’S what I call a kite!” I spent the weekend building and flying my first delta kites. Since it was a dream of mine to work for myself since I was a little kid, I thought it would be a good idea to take some time off to see if I could get something started. Little did I know that this would be the beginning of Revolution Kites.

After playing with deltas for a few weeks, flying, stacking, team flying with my brothers, I felt a need for more control. I tried various wing shapes, adding more control lines, and even hinged control surfaces, and even though I was having some limited success, it wasn’t what I was looking for. My vision was a kite that you could stop at any point in the sky, then back down with total control, and land – like the Harrier Jump Jet. That was my vision, and I’m big on visions. That’s what drives my passion.

Several months into experimenting (build the kite in the morning, fly it in the afternoon, wrestle with the results that evening, and come up with design changes for the next day’s attempt), I found I had hit a wall. I had run out of ideas.

Then one day, by chance, I was on the phone with my old boss in Santa Barbara, tying up some paperwork on an old project. Although our conversation had nothing to do with engineering or design, it somehow changed my state of mind. The next morning I opened my eyes and sat up in bed and said to myself, “That’s it! I need two independently controllable wings, just like an airplane!” This was the “Aha!” moment that changed everything.

The concept worked on the first prototype: two squares of fabric separated by an empty space. From then on it was the daily routine of building in the morning, flying in the afternoon, and re-designing in the evening for the next day’s build.

At this point I felt the hard work was done. We had made the leap to a conceptually new design, radically different than the current trends. We took eighty kites to the 1989 international kite trade show in San Diego. The Revolution design was an instant show stopper at the convention, selling out in the first hour, followed with orders for 400 more! We had a wall of people, three deep for three days placing orders.

But now we had a new kind of challenge before us – meeting demand. Things were crazy at our “headquarters” (AKA our parents’ garage). We enlisted everyone we knew to help us with production. We managed to get a golf club manufacturer to make our shafts, and a sail company to sell us rip-stop material and provide us with sewers. We did all the kite assembly, packaging, and shipping ourselves. As we sold more kites, we were able to hire people to work for us and to rent a production facility. I think my mother and father were a bit sad to see us go as they worked with us in the shop for many years after we moved. My dad made a lot of handles and tied a lot of bridles!

During that first year, we cleaned up the design, streamlined production, developed our graphite structure, filed for a patent, and started our company.

Once we had a kite that could be made efficiently, we had to concentrate on making it more accessible to the average person. Although selling the kites complete with a training video was the original plan, it had been dropped due to advice from store retailers that the cost would be prohibitive. After a couple months of frustration from new Revolution fliers and retailers, we began including the training videos with each Revolution sold. (This was the first time in history for stunt kites to come complete with training videos!) We instantly noticed the difference! New fliers that used to take two weeks to get the basics would now buy the Revolution, watch the training video that night, and learn the basic flying skills by the next day!

Revolution has always been a family affair.

Both my brothers, Dave and Jim, were key to the company. Revolution Kites would have been much less successful, maybe even impossible, without them. The actual business structure of the company is virtually Jim’s creation. With a business degree from USC, he had the skill set to do the nuts and bolts of the company. Both Jim and Dave spent countless hours test flying. Jim spent a lot of time just flying for fun, whereas I was more on a mission. After the company was started, Jim was very successful during the early years incorporating quad line flying into the international competitions, including precision, ballet, and team events. From the beginning and through to the present, virtually all quad line events are dominated by the Revolution design.

In the early days, Revolution kites were only allowed to compete in the Innovative classification. The four line control system and the independently controlled wings make the Revolution so precise that it is virtually impossible to compare it to a two line delta design. But a mistake was made one time when we were invited to a kite competition in Reno, Nevada. The event was sponsored by the local casinos and the competition was open to all comers. My two brothers and I promptly competed against the rest of the field which consisted of delta teams. We flew a knot tying demonstration, which is simple for a Revolution kite, and walked away, hands down, with the $1,000 first place prize. Needless to say, that was the first and last time we were allowed to compete against dual line kites.

My brother, Dave, was a registered golf pro at the time, and his connections in the golf industry set up the graphite R&D with the world’s leading golf shaft manufacturers that, over a six month period, developed the bullet-proof Revolution shafts that are the cornerstone of Revolution’s infamous durability. Before the graphite structure was developed, I built the prototypes using “70 series” aluminum arrow shafts. Although this material is stiff enough to use in a Revolution test, it soon bends and becomes useless. This is a classic difference between building for fun and building for production. The graphite was critical to our Revolution’s success. This also led to one of our patents in the golf industry for our computer controlled golf shaft machine. In fact, the company that helped developed our original Rev I shaft over 20 years ago now produces its golf shafts using our machines.

As the company grew, we brought in our sister, Lolly, to run the front office. She has been a great point of contact with all of our distributors – she’s become well known in kite circles on and off the field.

We also welcomed Ben D’Antonio to our team as the general manager of kites. He’s been instrumental in the Masterpiece Series and helps keep all of our fliers happy and in-the-know.

We have continued to add to our product line as a result of our experience in graphite. We’ve made bicycle components, model airplane parts, canes for the blind, and military components. Maybe nearest to my heart after kites is our Revolution Skateboard. After all these years, I’m still skateboarding every weekend – not bad for a guy who’s nearly fifty!