Low Wind High Flyers

by Doc Rod Hardin
(Germantown, Maryland, USA)

In the 1980s I made a 0.75 oz RS combination box kite based on a winged rombus tail and a forward Cody biplane. The longeron was about four feet down the center cutting unneeded weight. The wing span was roughly 4 feet. All hardwood dowel.

This kite was intended as a prototype. It would fly on one knot with almost no effort. It would glide at the top of a vertical line in a circle until it picked up another headwind. It won a Masters trophy from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in 1996.

I scaled it up to twice the dimension later on that flew well enough, but it was never quite the same. It was my third and last trophy from that festival.