Man-lifting Kite - After Powered Flight

After Powered Flight

After the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, the development of kites designed to lift heavy weights continued, but interest in designs specifically for lifting humans declined.

Alexander Graham Bell developed a tetrahedral kite, constructed of sticks arranged in a honeycomb of triangular sections, called cells. From a one cell model at the beginning of the 1890s, Bell advanced to a 3,393 cell "Cygnet" model in the early 1900s. This 40 foot (12.2 m) long, 200 lb (91 kg) kite was towed by a steamer in Baddeck Bay, Nova Scotia on December 6, 1907 and carried a man 168 feet (51.2 m) above the sea. Roald Amundsen, the polar explorer, commissioned tests on a man-lifting kite to see whether it would be suitable for use for observation in the Arctic, but the trials were unsatisfactory, and the idea was never developed.

It was not until the development of the Rogallo kite in the late 1940s that there was large scale interest in unpowered kite flying once again. The possibility of untethered flight on man-lifting kites led to the development of hang gliders and paragliders, but static-anchored-tethered man-lifting kites have seen little development, chiefly due to the lack of control inherent in the tethered design. Nowadays, most man-lifting is carried out on a dual line system, where the passenger on a single kite ascends a line held under tension by a train of kites. No kites are available commercially for the static-ground-based-anchored tethered flight of people. Note that many hang gliders are kited in various ways to get to an altitude to give the participant desired altitude; sometimes just a short glide is needed; sometimes an altitude is desired that will provide an opportunity for the kited hang glider pilot to seek and find assistive thermals.