A New Golden Age of Kite-Sailing
The Art of Rigging Kite Trains
"I posses certain secrets...in the way of Kite Flying." Sam Cody
Classic kite-master, cowboy Sam Cody, was a cunning mirror Buffalo Bill, who claimed birth in Birdville, Texas, right-on the New World Twilight Zone. To explain himself he described a Chinese Yoda, a chuck-wagon cook during the brief epoch of the great cattle drives, passing to him the very secret of flight, the ancient art of kitemaking.
Below: Cody using his white stallion to pull against a human lifting Cody "bat" kite. The deep-cut catenaries sure look Chinese.
Not all believe such strange Texas tales, where truth hides in a pack of lies. Something transformed Sam Cody into the original & foremost birdman in all Edwardian England. The evidence is compelling- Cody's Chinese Kite Master was probably Chang Kuo Lao, a Taoist Immortal, whose totems are bamboo & Phoenix Feathers (for kites, better than silk). "It is written" that he flies a thousand miles in a day from a "mule" folded like "paper" in his wallet (much like a pocket-sled kite). Remember, ancient wallets are considerably bigger than today's, purses really, one can carry lunch in them. The smallest parachute, the [VX39, Cani, '04] ever successfully landed was shipped folded in an overnight envelope that fits handily in an ancient wallet, with room for carry-out.
According to The Internet, Immortals are Celestials operating out of misty sky, as cells, & pass restricted airspace at will. Xu Miao is "Her Holiness Princess Ma Gu", of the Way of Infinite Harmony, a cannabis-cult, clearly high-as-a-kite, brutally repressed during the Cultural Revolution, now resurgent, if Wikipedia can be believed. Ts'ao Kuo-chiu rides a magic stork among luminous clouds. A colorful cross-dresser with one shoe, Lan Ts'ai-ho was last seen entering a cloud & probably haunts kite festivals. Han Hsang-Tzu can really shake you up, by making flowers grow right before your eyes, whether you want him to or not. Ho Hsien-Ku, aka Immortal Maiden, is fully etherealized around mountaintops, where those big standing waves await Gen4s* like stratospheric elevators.
What could such characters be up to? One suspects they are, against desperate odds, engineering a new "diamond" age in the sky. These extremists apparently believe kites are medicine for a sick planet.& Cody was a pawn in the scheme, Chang Kuo Lao's mule.
Anyway, like Will Rogers a generation later, Cody was empowered by a purified Cowboy Rope Science, the legacy of a rude culture that subjugating masses of wild surging flesh with rigging, into strings & teams, with lariats, bridles, & harnesses. Kites also have bridles. If not tied they wander off. The wind is flowing horses, poets confirm. Cody had only to see his chance & take it, discovering in the stick & muslin set-shop of his sleazy Wild West Show a wing-shop. The theatrical wing now truly flew (a coup ignored by stuffy theatre historians), & the flying circus was born.
Below: Cody kitingsailing off Dover in light air.
At first snubbed as a charlatan, Cody's Asian/cowboy tricks revolutionized kites, midwifed the RAF (a story behind the storied) & he pioneered in every class of aircraft. His great kite apprentice was, believe-it-or-not, Viennese UberNurd, Wittgenstein, a fledgling aeronautical engineer from ascendant science-culture, who, sizing up B. Russell's game, suddenly reinvented as iconic philosopher. The English sky reclaimed her Cody, his hero's funeral was thronged like Diana's. A cowboy grifter, as tutored by a "cook" had founded British Aviation.
*Gen4 SuperKites will be a glorious new class of jumbo aircraft, a cross of cloud & moon-bounce. Picture a vast robot cloud daintily trailing it's sea-dipped paravanes, self-sufficient to show up on any shore, a prophetic apparition of a deathless future. Uncorked Genies really, yes they'll tow rusty hulks, but one should wish for more.
SkySailing
From Kite Trains to Line Laundry, the fall & rebirth of an idea.
To fly a cloud of kite, the old-timers ran it up like a modern kite hobbyist festoons "line laundry" (novelty spinners, streamers, etc.)on a festival sled-kite.
In the quest for kite power many ideas failed- Kites flown in close parallel fight; tight kite stacks self-interfere; Giant kites beg for a handling crisis. Cellular kites suck if the cells suck (although Bell did discover a cellular stability effect).
Nicely spaced Kite-Train surfaces non-interfere. The full kite train spans three fuzzy zones of operation, aloft in proximity to the boat, moderately aloft, & far aloft. Maximum pull is attained by the full train.
Below: G. R. Lawrence's Kite Train over San Francisco, 1906.
Tapered Trains
Note the "pilot kite" at top, such kite trains usually went from small to large kites in sequence, a strategy that made kite power much safer & more reliable. Oscillations are dampened by a tapered train. Uniform trains are subject to harmful (potentially useful) harmonic effects.
A kite train is drawn from a suitable kite "quiver" for maximum flexibility. The PilotKites, MainLifterKites, StormKites, LightAirKites, DownwindSleds, etc.. Cody, started with a small PilotKite to establish the tether, & a mighty Kite "quiver" to hang off it. He used a system of sized sliding rings stopped by sized cones.
The following sketch depicts a helium buoyed Lifting Kite module for a modern kite-train
Sadly the faint kite-risers are lost in compression. The tail is a C-kite to act as a rudder- more control & stability, plus its own added lift. The main wings 60% reefable by accordion pleating. The outer wing is a "hard" inflated bow that remains as a high speed fin in a gale, as shown vaguely below the 3/4 view. These buoyant wingtips might serve as pontoons legs holding the kite above the water, in zero conditions where a slight heavier-than-air condition is desired. The envelope has a slight wasp-waist to better blend wing-body (area-rule) & tuck away reefed wing..
A Dead Idea (idea replaced by in-water kite-towed-turbine.)- A roller furling spinner-kite module either as a passive traction sweeper or an electric generation module. Soon an ultralight ultrapowerful High Temperature SuperConducter-based generator will be available.
Kite-trains enable large power to be generated while keeping components at a manageable scale. For this reason Clipper ships had so many sails.
The water-sled component, capable of full quiver operations, of a self sufficient kite tug is a Kon Tiki, after kite-fishing usage. Note race-track monorail, a complete oval around boat with high speed travelers.
The lenticular superstructure has low windage from wide angles & acts as reserve sponson buoyancy. The out riggers are ski-like planing floats. The main semisubmerged hull is a large compressed &/or liquefied gas bottle, or more prosaically, lead-acid battery banks.
Twinned Trains
Running in light-air favors adding a second or (more) train(s) that need to be kept reliably apart, oh how grand it would look.
Imagine vast wind-nets "woven " from kite trains blowing around the edge of low pressure systems.
Notes-
Cultural Kiting
Guatemalan Maya Giant Kites as peaceful expression against genocide.
India's spiritual kite traditions, gendered fighting kites
Watch out for "Death Kites", the abuse of the kite for destructive ends, fortunately the kite resists evil.
A kite is a metaphor of instability, mustang-wild, operating in an essentially stalled condition, the despair of aeronautical engineering, yet yields to child's play. A five year old instantly grasps that Kites & Bikes can save the world. The adult scoffs. When first kite flew, joyous kids just believed it, elders feared witchcraft. Children's toys like balls, balloons, tops, yo-yos, kites, & bikes are deepest physics with a simple smiling face, magic reality..
Kites arrive on the perfumed breezes of balmy spring; what's up with that?
10,000 Kites - Israel/Palestine, Spring 2005, Art-for-peace event inspired by a Palestinian child flying a kite amidst the rubble of his war-torn neighborhood in Qalqilya.. More than 30,000 kites painted with messages of peace were flown from Metula to Ayalot, Anata in the West Bank, and in Rahma, Jordan. Roughly 10,000 Israelis, many Arab citizens, participated in the project
Oh, to take a (sur)real bike ride along the endless Texas Gulf Coast pulled by a kite all the way to Old Mexico, gliding along at low tide, blue bioluminescent surf under crimson moon, hardly pedaling, but laughing & whooping a lot. A cheap sled kite can pull a nomad bike hundreds of miles along those barrier islands, if migrating in sync with the winds, which alternate like breathing much of the year. A wheel outrigger/sidecar would make the bike a trike that one steers with a toe while flying a hot kite.