Kite Radical

The kite is the new bike, utopian DIY people's aviation. We shall mate like eagles under our hempen-pinions, & so on.

Nearly 200 years ago Pocock found his char-volant (kite-wagon) subversive & liberational;

There is a peculiar satisfaction in not being detained at toll-bars. The pains and the penalties which there arrest common travellers, never intercept this celestial equipage.

The char-volant blew-the-doors-off aristocratic horse-coaches & got him in trouble. Feudal Japanese super-bandit, Goyemon, a winged Robin Hood, burglarized castles from a kite.

Kites not Bombs (KnB)

WARNING: The Polyester Mushroom Cloud

Large kite arrays enable weather modification comparable to mountain effects, increasing precipitaion to windward, decreasing a-lee. Hostile power might deny rain to a downwind region. Climate change can be worsened or mitigated by large-scale kite-arrays. For example, harvesting "Pineapple Express" jets over the East Pacific might reduce excess rossby-wave heat transfer to northern latitudes & save sea-ice & permafrost environments. Reflecting sun upward from white kites, as a side-effect, & radiating waste heat to space, can slow global warming. Kites turn wind into slightly heated air radiating IR that over light colored terrain will tend to reflect & radiate spaceward, but over water will be absorbed considerably. Microconsumption is key to saving nature, not bloated "green industry", like gratuitous kite-energy.

above: anti-LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) protest kite to fly over Lower Columbia River

Flytopian Visions

We'll pick our gardens & fruit trees from above, hop up mountains Tepache laden. Levity to the levitated. Fermented ballast soon lightens. We'll converse by whoops & hollers, mating on-the-wing, like eagles, then sleep curled in a bowl of stars. In the future all our crappy work will be done by giant (or tiny) flying puppets.

Our Scrap Rafts will skitter across oceans drawn by colorful kite clouds. We'll trawl plastic (slow, sealife friendly) into floating islands wrapped in confiscated drift-nets- Floatopias. We'll kitelift litter out of wildness to recycling centers. Our dematerialized bike nomadics, radical circus acrobatics, & tree-sitting banner-dropping climbing skill-share traditions pre-evolved us as SkyMonkeys. Beehive's mural banners sew into aircraft called sled-kites. With such kites tree sitters & tripod sitters can be reprovisioned & even commute to action, spider-like. Nothing stops us. Our kite-masters already fly hot foils in forests, thru cities, between buildings, dipping under or skipping over wires & bridges. Our bicycle-towed kites already begin to wander calm skies, silent invisible Indy Media microvideo platflorms that CopWatch or Quaker-Witness those places where activists never got before- Radical Telepresence.

Redemptive Technology, the repurposing of fishing & logging knowledge rig kite energy that displaces oil & coal.

Local sun/moon/wind-time shall replace Gregorian-Babylonon slave calender-clock; Surf's Up! Resist abuse of natural flows, nonviolently. We'll tilt from death kites, (massive parafoil bombs) with Peace Kites. Icons, rad patches dot the sky lofting pirate radio cells.

What a wondrous long-strange-trip in the Western Paradise, Portland was a good place to provision, the best artificial furriers to upgrading my class-warrior furry suit for summits, snow capped volcanos calling. A new gen mutant bike came together. Set up an infant ecovillage FurBall, solar irrigation, composting toilets, etc., a second BioSquat, on superland.

My coolest summer ever was living/working out of ClownHouse on radical kite-power DIY, after an intensive apprenticeship/collaboration with my recuiters, the world's elite kitemasters & technologists, in Bay Area & at Nevada flying sites.

Corporate-militarist hipsters, some i met, helped create a new kind of super-bomb, "swarms of smart bombs" in the marketing buzz, giant high-explosive laden robot parafoils. Village Busters i call them.

Many of the Silicon Valley venture types get-by on military funding, guilt-ridden (or not) long-hairs in fancy euro sports-cars. Such work was dangled before me. On pacifist grounds i was driven to a counter-cultural qwest to find & found liberational kiting; elegant ways forward to the kite-energy problem better than known schemes with millions of research dollars & scores of patents riding on the outcome, upsetting the game. to restore balance & hopefully help usher in an unexpected golden festive age.

Techne to the people, human scale, DIY, in the form of spectacular demos at counter-cultural venues, antidotes to soured monopolist fantasies of military-industrialists. some very clever hacks, very beautiful, the kite is the new bike, Kalebnikov's utopia as dreamed by children .

Redemptive Kite Technology

Oh, the peaceful potential of abundant clean energy that displaces oil, like my little pacifist tech-Op in the basement of ClownHouse, a race to free kite knowledge as open-source faster than the militarist zillionaires can turn it into private intellectual property.

Its a desperate gamble, possibly mistaken, driven by crisis, to undertake redemptive reuse of destructive technologies, a sustainable kiting built on the ashes of logging, fishing, mining, militarism & such, to create new healing forces; paths from destruction to creation.

Portland-Austin's countercultural kitebot technology.

pesky problems in kite-energy, as human scale DIY, conform industrial use by "honor license".

what a wondrous long strange trip in the western Paradise, snow capped volcanos call, Dog-Time 7 to 1 fast slow-time, lunar-solar synched,

NewSkool

Portland's finest artificial furriers upgraded my furry suit for summits. A new mutant bike is coming together. also setting up an ecovillage kit, solar cooking, composters, etc., to set up a second biosquat (FurBall). How coolit was living/working out of ClownHouse on radical kite-power DIY, after an intensive apprenticeship/collaboration with KiteShip & several of, the world's elite kite technologists, in Bay Area & Nevada flying sites.

I teamed up with eccentric Portland visionary, Wayne German, an embedded systems savant & kite visionary. Wayne had been inspired by my old work (like the sailing toy that screwed itself directly upwind that laid foundation for current devices) & was a bit stunned when i showed up in person.

we intend to deliver the technology to the people, at human scale, DIYable, in the form of spectacular demos at counter-cultural venues, souring the monopolist fantasies of the corporate militarists. some very clever techne, very beautiful, the kite is the new bike, Kalebnikov's utopia as dreamed by children. there's more writing going about this crazy quest, if you want to read it. ...but now the filthy basement bowels of ClownHouse have been cleaned up into an underground KiteLab, a race against time & sYSTEM, as ClownHousemoves in Aug., having grossly over-gentrified its environs into a hyped up "Art District".

Many Thanx to Dingo & Caffeine

My clown personae is Mexican BigFoot, on a circular trail of bigfoot sightings around Portland, looking to hook-up with a NWLady bigfoot. My lair is in the secret Kite Lab in the cellars under ClownHouse. Whoops, secret no more.

pesky problems in kite-energy, as human scale DIY, conform industrial use by "social license".

HUMOR?

KiteLab was spawned in the filthy underground bowels of Portland's legendary Clown House. Anyway ClownHouse ended in Aug., due to self-gentrification of its neighborhood. The Kite Lab went nomadic, bringing revolutionary kites into the world.

Wildcat the Sky for Kite Oil

with Mexican Big-Foot (Dave Santos)

ClownHouse Science Officer

Inventor of the

APE* KiteMotor

*Austin/Portland-Eugene

have found, in a great location, living & metal/electronics/fab shop space & everything bikeable, just like Austin, for only 200 a month, so the burn rate is low. Have found a (blue) Scanoe as a developmental mate to KiteShip's, from an inflatable sponson craftsman, will also order min- sponsons and plank up rail fore & aft, with the "ocean bow". considering ornithoper-kites as natural for pumping applications over low stretch line,

When i arrived in Portland, kite visionary Wayne German said fear-not revealing that he was Jesus as his name adds up to 888 in Chaldean numerology. This is how real embedded-systems gods think, an alpha Intel savant who was, one day, sure enough, trundled away to Nurse Rachet. If German is Jesus, Pascal's Wager pays like a mega-lottery. Pray to Wayne, aka Jesus who, along with me, Mexican Big-foot, & maybe You, will redeem the world with Kitebots. Then in Skamokoa StarkHawk, Witch of the West, enchanted the KiteMotor right for its brilliant maiden flight. Forgive me Jesus!

Kiddie kites, of all things, come with a printed warning against an ancient dread, being struck-dead from the heavens; be warned all ye would-be New Prometheus, stealing Sky God electricity.

Living in the Sky-

Preferred kites are made of compostable organics- grass, hemp, linen, paper, ideally excess CO2 mined on-the-wing. Kites can gather cloud water, dry laundry, mill, cook, heat, & make electricity for our mutant gadgets, so crank the music. Sprouts & mushrooms, grown aeroponically aloft, will be staples.

There will long be down-time, great for dreaming of flight, preparing always. When the wind is calm fly a ballon, boomerang, or water-rocket; or tow a kite. In storm down-time make kites, maintain gear. As wind rises a series of kites go up or down, starting with UL (ultralight) kites, reaching a peak then declining as wind increases to storm conditions.

Solar cooking aloft will be enabled by a Braitenburg servo-loop maintaining sun orientation independent of wind/kite oreientation. The cooker might be a disc wing or faired sphere. The composting kite-toilet is a revival of the original humanure plastic bucket; one that is a "kiteline messinger" device that ziplines down to a composting bioreactor, empties, & returns aloft by its own wings. The kite urinal will be tethered by its piss-tube.

Our rope treehouses & gypsy bike-wagons worked out ways to live light & high. Bike parts cover a multitude of kite uses.

Who knew? Utopia, kite-based, strings attached. It will be extreme-sport fool-killing dangerous at first but, what the hell, nature & humanity are endangered; we are called to heroic action, to world saving art flyiing free.

Kite pro average a tragic accident per ~100,000 hours, an unacceptable rate. Extreme precaution & the Kite Age dawns safe as airlines, one crash per ~50,000 flight years. In many situations, aloft is safest. Runaway kites are a menace, kite-killers needed.

Kite dance & star twinkle trace to quantum jitter at the dawn of time, as the tiny Universe began inflation. How cool is that?

Following Bondestam, to make a kite from litter, but a fourline kite of considerable size, & with it lift & transport additional trash repeatedly to a dumpster drop, & end by flying the spent kite into the bin, nature restored, & return as empty-handed as one started.

Avitecture

A real kite visionary is Martin Bondestam, what a gift when Kaye let me borrow his book from the Kite Museum. A Finnish architect who has created a totality, a multi-vision of cultural kiting, including the flying home twentey years before my own design work on the concept. Our rope treehouses in Austin, our hammocks, our climbing skills all prepeared us

Landing Legs with rollers or runners for moving.

Parachute tether, should the kite lift part the human module comes down safely onto the landing legs. Folks might hang out over airbag systems. Fall safety must be failsafe. As ever in aviation, adequate altitude is safety.

===================================

Surfing surface COTS (Clear AIr Turbulence)

Urban kite air is white-water, barely navigable to power kites, a turbulence zoo, standing waves & vortex trains crisscrossed with high voltage. Invisible mini-tornados are shed or embedded in the obstacle windfield, hollow cored violent cylinder beings shed from building corners. Gustiness is the sign these gnarly worms are about.

Situationalist Kiting

"The rider must be proacive to create the desired situation..." (Holzhal, kiteboarding's simple plan)

Extreme kite-sports begin radical, as does actvism. Science & nature are inherently radicallizing. The new life is extremely cool.

Secret Kite, Kite Sorcery Manual, Mad Kite Science, Outlaw Kiter's Cheat-Notes, KiteKult, Pirate Kiting Guide, Punk Kites, Anarch-kitist, Radical Kite Manifesto, Ethno-Kiting, Kite & Gender Studies, Kite:True Cross?,, Kiter's Bible

* formerly The Incorrigable Child's Guide to Kite Mischief

=======================

The Kite-Sorcerer's Apprentice

Memo: The Mexican Astronaut on the Space Shuttle is back.
Flash: You don't say! How did it go?
Memo: Rather well, but his hands were badly swollen.
Flash: Swollen! Why?
Memo: The whole trip was- "Don't touch that!" SLAP; "Don't touch that!" SLAP...

A kite apprenticeship is mostly golden Arcadian hours of kite-flying singing songs of innocence. So mine went until boredom kicked in & i gravitated to freak winds around Cold War military ruins near KiteShip. In certain invisible sky-places the kite rythmically imploded in sizzling pockets of void (vortical filiments), or as suddenly fainted into a slack-line bow-tie. A session there was a year's freak air at a normal kite field.

Hundreds of hours fying hyperturbulence honed my reflexes till i swung, jabbed, & jumped as Hadzicki taught me at NABX. Instead of doing tricks i sparred gnarl. My manic wing now mongoose-danced, every twist followed with untwist, like fast-forward followed by slow-mo reverse, the wadded kite in free-fall smoothed-open like money. My kite became reliable, a good dog. Freak air itself invents exotic kite tricks; one need only follow.*

The kite revealed itself as a powerful scientific instrument, an aeoluscope; a probing tell-tale, a giant's cane to tap along retograde eddies sheathed in laminar standing waves, or bumping along shed vortical trains. I now saw helical handedness as micro-gustnados slapped a wingtip. Many of the invisible creatures seen in fluid-dynamics labs were revealed in odd corners. A vortex is a worm, a gaseous spindle, a flywheel held together by a vacuum hub.

*a backwards secret to kite flying- skillful pilots let the wind lead.

My kite Senseis, particularly Dave Culp, frowned on willful seeking of bad air, the reverse instinct of normal kiting that might somehow spoil technique. I compensated with two years on the Pacific Coast flying famously good winds.

I ever more fluently read natural wind fields, whether by birds, clouds, dune grass, & water, spotting tiny clues hidden in a big picture, like Kickapoo/Black Seminole tracking or Sherlock sleuthing, but in the sky. Its possible to see meaning in the smalest ripple or waggle of a kite.

Dean Jordan's Japanese kite-master taught that ALL kite flying is valuable, & so it has proved. Ispent months mostly flying cheap kid kites picked up on sale for a dollar or two. These unpresuming little aircraft underwent radical modifications & undertook adventures far beyond average adult kites.

Endurance flying was required to resolve persistent mysteries, i became a beach presence in all weather. "Explsosive marine cyclones" became old hat, blasting wet sand in my eyes, if i glanced windward. I often wandered urban zones, kite in tow, down-reeling under power lines, just clearing rooflines. I entered buildings with the kite still flying outside, unreeling deep within like Thesius, or flew out a window, as weather raged. I stalked the night sweeping wild figures overhead. Once my swooping kite-shadow, giant stingray as projected by a streetlight, spooked friends lighting off leftover New Year's fireworks. They looked up fearfully, bursting whizzing fireworks forgotten, it was Batman, come to life.

==============

One afternoon I was babbling to Dean Jordan about kitemaking & Dean blurted, "but you are not a kitemaker." Alas, so true, I thought sadly, having just met the very gods, Dean himself, Dave Culp, Joe hadziki, Jose Sainz, Scott Skinner, Don Montegue, Pete Lynn, & even Peter Lynn himself. Then, over the next two years buried memories flooded back. My aviator dad very early showed me how to make the classic child's bowed Eddy of newspaper. At age seven, the next door neighbor, Jim Brown, a physics professor built & flew with me an incredably light tissue winged-Conyne, that rose in almost no air, at a fantasticly high angle, an image seared in my brain. The family moved to the DC area just as Paul Garber founded the Smithsonian Kite Festival, & i attended from the start.

Inspired by a butterfly kite in a B & W movie (Lord Jim) i began to make asian kites, & lo, my mother pulled out of a closet a Chinese fertility kite i had made at around 9 years old, rather well made, batiked & handsewn over bamboo i cut myself (Below).

My "Japanese" uncle, Roy, a strange case of deep acculturation, developed my skills, Karate-Kid-like. In those days the Air & Space museum was just ramshackle quonset huts where i would play hooky. There, by the entrance on the left, was the first Wright Flyer. I would steal my hand out over the rope & touch it, feeling a sort of manna transfer, as well as pawing NASA's holiest relics.

Over the years i designed & built every sort of tethered flying object, even little electricity-generating wind turbines to hang from trees, or swing on strings at school outreach all over Austin. I developed flying wings & spheres on tether-rods that flew nimbly over masses of kids at astounding speeds (Silicon Barrio/Robot Group '84-'93). The climax of my tethered aircraft was the spectacular flying of lifesized winged humanoids, like angels, over downtown Austin, pulled aloft by elastic to unhooked soar under radio control (with electric/soaring RC guru George Parks)

Much later, at the World Kite Museums Indoor Kite Festival (2008) i made a tethered flying sphere from scrap on my old pattern & it proved to be the coolest/fastest indoor kite present, in a new-born sport, there were even pros. Old Ray Bethel's wizened assistant, Chuck, hobbled up & said, "I must buy that kite from you!" I looked-up my old web page on the spheres & was stunned to see, "a sort of pendulum kite" in my description of the tethered version (most were free-flying or RC). I was a sort of kitemaker after all, having forgotten more about it than many kitemakers seem to know know.

But there was so much to remember, for i grew up in the air, toted along in every sort of aircaft by my mom & dad from two weeks of age. By age 5 i was a little pilot flyng by instruments for hours, unable to see over the control panel. A primitive autopilot, a Mitchell probably, caught my imagination, the airplane revealed itself as a big robot, & i resolved to become an aerospace-roboticist. Those childhood years in loud piston planes deafened me, gave me tinnitus, which only slowly abated over dacades. I followed my dad everywhere as he became an early sport skydiver. I was steeped in that sport, learned packing & rigging from masters. The Paracommander was the dominant chute, but suddenly gave way to the square canopy, Jabert's parafoil. I still remember when a red toy parafoil first appeared at a skydiving meet in Zeppher Hills, not far from Boca Raton where Jabert invented it. My dad was an airshow clown on weekends, doing incredible stunts, while i read books. A dozen close family friends died in front of me, by preventable error. One trauma was to see the Australian Bird Man die right in front of me at Transpo 72, his rogallo wrapped around him. There were many tethered aviation experiences to recall, being towed aloft in gliders & banner towing were instructive.

We also sailed & raced as a family. I was captain of my high school sailing team in Annapolis, my lovely crew's dad even owned Running Tide, the "winningest boat of all time." We were the only high schoolers qualified to race against the college teams that came to the Naval Academy regattas. Elvstrom was a hero. I also ran crab lines out in the Bay from an eight foot punt. My dad recently called me a "child of the wind", an odd sounding assertion for him. But i was a native of Austin, a sort of Florence. How Texas changed kiting is a still unfolding story.

"Austin is a kiteflier's town" Bob Ingraham, 1967

Austin's Kite festival has gone on for 82 years, the oldest i can find (2009), Sac City is claimed oldest on a shabby tourist trivia site, without giving a date, & falsely asserting that only a Japanese Kite Festival is older. San Diego's Kite Fest outright lies about being oldest, at 63 years. The Smithsonian Kite Festival is merely half as old as Austin's, & WSKIF, younger still. Kite Fests are now ubiquitous to most every town & city in America. Of course, from India to Japan, Asia has quite ancient festivals.

Cody claimed he learned kitemaking from a Chinese chuckwagon cook in Texas. The most advanced sticky kite, the modern delta, was invented in Texas by Wilbur Green, in the mid 1940s, inspired by a picture of a Chinese bird kite. The Gayla kite was Green's original production delta, to which i was peculiarly addicted as a boy. Today one may buy a three dollar toy delta to out-fly most hundred dollar indoor or outdoor kites.

=======================================

The Stratosphere is a "Harsh Mistress"

Never-mind the Polyester Mushroom Cloud scenario, why stratospheric kiting sucks-

High altitude super-kites will operate in dynamic ranges beyond normal aviation. Jet-streams are hurricane-to-tornado-force winds acting on vast floppy canopies. An airliner avoids or rides with jet-streams, but a kite is tethered in whatever chaos prevails. Kite killing turbulent boundaries lurk at all altitudes, even in normal conditions. Kites in the stratosphere are easily lost from view, hard to locate visually, initially limited to VFR (Visual Flight Reference) conditions, no night flight (ouch). Common icing is deadly to kites. The stratosphere is very cold & electromech must be specially hardened. Suitable avionics don't exist yet, early control systems will be rather blind. A simple element like a pitot-tube is totally fooled by stall or ice, endangering the whole system. Retrieving a high-flying kite stuck powered-up will take hours. A simple line-over glitch, hidden from sensors, is enough for total control loss. Lost hardware is a fatal hazard. A snarled ground-winch, a dead battery, a worn little string, a simple tangle & a nightmare can result. A super kite can pull over buildings, one after another, actually maintaining flight by dragging amok. One bright note for super-kites is that Air Traffic Control (ATC) issues are not deal-killers. There are many paths to ATC integration, ultimately Kite-Zones will be as routine a flight obstacle as a mountain.

Take it from a rogue aerospace roboticist ;^), reliable tethered aviation in the stratosphere (or even mid-troposphere) is an insane fantasy (for now). Even modest kite energy schemes at a human DIY scale are sketch, but the power is there, waiting... dave

...missed keying in on one general kite-tech point, lofted v. grounded gens; by old open-sources pete was pro flying gen, peter con, i totally think peter was right (unless you talkin' cheap-as-diamonds (clean-coal?) regenerative electric motor-glider's for zillionaire playboys), if makani went pro gen-fly, as suggested in one interview, guessing bad decision. Makani combines-

1) aerospace UAV "crack", 2) seemingly insane "high altitude"* spec, 3) giant-sized futzing, 4) Secret "Science" & Dear Leader model, 5) an inverse synergy of GE/NASA ruins, NDA/VC corruption, & Googley-kiddie culture.

-is bound to hamper just acing basic kite power, without big setbacks (fatalities?) & waste. If the old garage start-up magic still works & if the whole non-mkn (open/academic) universe has any brains, it won't be pretty for mkn...unless they learn to lead. The current petty suspense is galling the outsiders, even big reporters are griping about stonewalling. There better be some hot news soon. Open-source folks are poking Google.org, from doc brillo on down, with pressbox watching, to open the Makani sack, share the sweet-genius research, & support the kite dev globally (even euros, they buy google ads & stock).Google.org has a hundred times the money to free every credible kite patent & put all the best kite engineers to work. Warn 'em reporters to be asking- Why not? My indirect smell tests- Did Squid ever deliver any super-glasses to the poor myopes? Is it me or does the Potenco "lawn mower" human interface totally suck? How's that smart-rope-revolution going? Why are instructables projects so lame? Did mkn lose the stinkin' steppers? i can't give them a single point yet....still, 17 million must buy something grand...you think?
* SG lately redefined "high altitude" as anything higher than a wind tower, which really helps, & yes heated gimbaled pitots will work (like batshit) ;^)
---

there's more writing about this crazy quest, if you want to read it. ...but now the filthy basement bowels of ClownHouse have been cleaned up into an underground KiteLab, a race against time & sYSTEM, as ClownHousemoves in Aug., having grossly over-gentrified its environs into a hyped up "Art District". (2007)

comment to: santos137@yahoo.com

BACK TO CONTENTS

I'm excited by what you are doing, Dave, and wish you the best of luck (you've already got brains, persistence and connections. All that's left is a little luck!)

Thanks a lot for including me in your mailings. Best wishes for (your choice of mid-winter pagan festivals inserted here). And Happy New Year!

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 12:16 PM, dave santos <santos137@yahoo.com> wrote:

ODD NOTES (will add to & polish later, but don't care to clue too-much too-soon to closed-source Google.org Robber Barons ;^)) ============================== Much fun piecing together a What's-Makani-up-to? picture. The Goal- Cheaper-Than-Coal rather daunting, but cheaper-than-Makani, how hard can that be? (KiteLab to grab low-hanging-fruit) From scant press clues it appears the secretive effort explored motor-gen combos towing kite elements aloft, with mixed results. The firm futzed with poorly optimized LTA (just go lease some certified aerostats or bare Zeppelin NTs, for krysake ;^). Electric UAVs are weak-kittens for tow aloft, motor-gen combos will tend to suck even worse, the numbers don't work too well, but if anyone wants reliable cheap high altitude test-pilot service- [advertisment] Air-Tractor is cheapest most powerful workhorse to lower stratosphere, note P-51 heritage. My dad ferries them to Europe a-la-Lindbergh, now that he's retired from airline, & he recommends the type. Turbocharged or full turbine, fast climb, my dad has oxygen gear & can be hired as kite energy test-pilot (since his pension & portfolio tanked). Air tractors made in Olney TX, just down the road from his residential air-park, he's ready to fly... http://www.airtractor.com/Default.aspx?p=4530 A dear family friend & mentor, Andy Keech launched his high-altitude-autogyro-record from Dad's hangar, where modifications for altitude were completed (& Waxahachee autogyro meet, i rode my bike at same time there, about 60 miles) http://museum.eaa.org/collection/aircraft/Herron_Keech%20Little%20Wing%20Autogyro.asp The two of them have more experience in towing/skydiving/general-aviation etc. than just about anyone...great team for dangerous trials, a glorious way for old men to go. ===================================== Stratosphere a "Harsh Mistress" as sent "off-record" to growing list of kite energy journalists a while back... Why stratospheric kiting sucks-

High Altitude super-kites will operate in dynamic ranges beyond normal aviation. High-altitude jet-streams are hurricane-to-tornado-force winds acting on vast floppy canopies. An airliner avoids CAT (Clear-Air-Turbulence) at boundaries or rides with jet-streams, but a kite must stand-ground tethered in such chaos. Kite-killing turbulent boundaries abound at all altitudes, even in fairly normal conditions, Kites in the stratosphere are easily lost from view, hard to locate visually, initially limited to VFR (Visual Flight Reference) conditions, no night flight (capacity-factor; ouch). Common icing at middle altitudes is potentially deadly to kites. The stratosphere is very cold & electromech must be specially "hardened". Reliable super-kite avionics don't exist yet, early control systems will be rather blind. A simple element like a pitot-tube is totally fooled by stall or ice, endangering the whole system**. Retrieving a high-flying kite stuck powered-up will take hours. A simple line-over glitch, hidden from sensors, is enough for total control loss. Lost hardware is a fatal hazard. A snarled ground-winch, a dead battery, a worn little string, a simple tangle & a nightmare can result. A super kite can pull over buildings, one after another, actually maintaining flight by dragging amok. One bright note for super-kites is that Air Traffic Control (ATC) issues are not deal-killers. There are many paths to ATC integration, ultimately Kite-Zones will be as routine a flight obstacle as a mountain (or SkyDiving DZ- note from dad).

** i met SG & opined that Makani's choice of pitot-based sensors cannot be relied on for high-consequence kites due to pitot-stall (by natural-wind & apparent-wind turbulence & aeroelastic jitter) & pitot-clogging in icing conditions, he acted unconcerned. I researched alternatives, developed work-arounds & also flew considerable kite-icing trials. KiteLab sez- Low-Tech Low-Altitude Kite Energy Rocks

Back in aught-six speed-sailing kite-boating legend, Dave Culp, set me to think on giant kites for ocean shipping. He & Dean Jordon became my Kite Gurus, on intense apprenticeship in modern traction kiting, from KiteShip's world-record monster kites to the annual convergence of Kite Wizards in the Mojave Desert. The collective task of taming these flukey creations into Kitebots, a human-scale to global-scale techne for clean energy, transport, right-livelihood, & deep play.