Authors: Peter Lynn
Date Submitted: August 31, 2005
Article Type: Journal

The reason traction kites have taken so long to develop to the state of useability we now expect is because there are so many performance factors that all have to work at the same time. Yes, we need good upwind performance; but we also have to have luff resistance, crash resistance, launchability, packability, buildability, etc., and now, power control—-the list is endless. So much complexity, so many possible ways to do things, at least we can be sure that traction kites will continue to improve in the foreseeable future.

But kite traction design and development is comparatively easy because the aerodynamic principles underlying steerable kites are relatively well understood, even while being difficult to apply in practice. Counter-intuitively, single line kite design is much more difficult, I would say, to a first level-approximation, that it is still not possible to design a new style of single line kite from scratch with any real hope of success, even though the first single line kite probably flew as long as 10,000 years ago. What we can do is make a guess, play around endlessly with minor changes, and sometimes succeed, but not often.

After 35 years of working full time in this field, I still have no useful understanding of why kites fly, or rather, why they don’t fly, their overwhelming preference. Sure there’s one underlying principle that’s certain, that kites are pendulums, but what it is that makes any particular design stable is a mystery to me, and everyone else too as far as I can see.

PDF Link: Journal Issue