Authors: Tal Streeter
Date Submitted: August 31, 2002
Article Type: Journal

By the late l950s, Domina Jalbert had involved himself in just about everything possessing the possibility of getting up off the ground into the sky. His professional life was devoted to flight: balloons, kites, airplanes, parachutes, and kite-balloons (an early invention, the Kytoon, was developed first as a barrage balloon flown to impede raids by wartime aircraft and was later employed for a variety of purposes). For all of his industry and creative powers, it was not until a crucial point in l957, piloting his Beechcraft on a return trip from an exhibition given by a team of sky diver parachutists he sponsored, that Jalbert’s inventive powers reached their full fruition. The parachute team was an offshoot of his passion for aviation. Kites were his first and a lifelong love, sewn for him as a child out of old bedsheets by his mother. Balloons and parachutes followed. The flash of inspiration which came to him at the controls of his Beechcraft was an amalgamation of kite and parachute incorporating crucial elements from winged aircraft and his own Kytoon.

One must be forgiven for not being readily able to discern where the parachute leaves off and kite begins: in general appearance quite similar, in roles they are subtly different. Fifty-one years old at the time, self-taught, an aeronautical genius, Jalbert was struck with an image of something more basic than either ‘chute or kite. His vision was of a wing: a soft wing, completely non-rigid in and of itself, but made rigid when its cells were inflated by the rush of air. As he tells the story, immediately upon landing his plane he got out, picked up a stick, unscrewed the airplane’s wing gas tank cap, and stuck the stick in, measuring the depth of the wing’s chord. His first soft, cellular experiments were based on the Beechcraft wing’s proportions.

Jalbert called it the Parafoil.

His idea involved joining the airfoil form of an airplane wing, the shaped definition of a sewn gored fabric parachute, the ram-air inflation of a tapered windsock, and the keel-like bridling system of a barrage balloon. Given the variety and depth of Jalbert’s expertise in these areas, both theoretical and practical, all of them at work in the Parafoil, it is doubtful that anyone would have had a similarly rich background to have enabled him to come up with such a revolutionary concept. A piece of each part of his life had found its way into the Parafoil. Archetypically giving proof to the truism of life being more astonishing than fiction—that this idea came forth in the cockpit of a plane, its inventor at the plane’s controls—the Parafoil must reign as the only kite in history to have seen its first light of day, born flying in its natural habitat, aloft in the blue sky.

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