The Peter Powell Stunt Kite

Classic Steerable Diamond Kite

The Peter Powell Stunt Kite is a classic, and copies popped up such as the Cayman stunt kite in the next section down below. Unlike most modern stunters, it was a steerable diamond. This design enjoyed huge popularity and is still well-known today. Every kite came with a 30 meter (100 foot) plastic tubular tail which added spectacle and put a grin on the face of anyone watching!

Peter Powell Sky Stunter MkIII in flight.

Yours truly with a MkIII

Just a couple of years before Peter passed away in 2016, he and his sons reintroduced a design based on the original, called the Sky Stunter MkIII. It was an exciting development for fans of this classic kite!

It was fairly straightforward to stack the Powell kites too, so people had fun flying several at a time. This is set to continue, with the MkIII available in a stack of three.

You have to wonder if all those super-long tails ever got tangled when more than one kite was attached to the lines. Perhaps only one tail, on the furthest kite, was the way to go.

In the 1970s, millions of Peter Powell stunt kites were sold when stunt flying became a craze in the UK. Mr. Powell himself lived in that corner of the world and has sons who no doubt have flown a kite or two themselves by now.

Although multi-line kites have also been around for a long time, it was the Peter Powell kite that really boosted the popularity of this kind of controlled kite-flying. Instead of just a handful of expert enthusiasts being involved with stunters and traction kites, the general public ended up embracing all kinds of multi-line kiting.

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'Cayman' Peter Powell Stunt Kite

Courtesy of WindPowerSports

These kites are not available for sale any more. However, you might find some technical details interesting, particularly if you have never actually handled the kite itself.

The photo over there shows a red-and-yellow Cayman. See how this sport kite is actually a delta in disguise! It has nearly everything a single-line delta has, except a keel. The two leading-edge spars are there, as is the spine down the middle and the spreader keeping the leading edges apart. However, the spine is so long that the sail shape looks just like a diamond from a distance!

Here are some specs:

Wind range: 13–65 kph (8–40 mph)
Wingspan: 122 cm (48 in.)
Height: 120 cm (47 in.)
Weight: 240 g (8.5 oz.)
Sail fabric: ripstop nylon
Spar material: fiberglass

Thanks are due to the guys at windpowersports.com for the above details.

A History:
The Peter Powell Stunt Kite

Early 1970s

The very first kites came with bamboo spars! That's a great choice for homemade kites, but perhaps they don't lend themselves to mass production. These stunters had black plastic sails.

Mid 1970s

By this time, things were going crazy. The distinctive diamond stunter was being churned out en mass with aluminum spars. The initial color choices for the sail were red or blue, but yellow, pink, and black (and others) soon followed.

Enormously long tubular tails which inflated in the wind came in bright red and yellow, and probably some other colors as well.

Wooden handles for the flying lines were supplied and the instructions were printed on parchment.

Mid 1980s

This was the age of fiberglass spars, and the Peter Powell design followed suit. Maybe safety was a concern too! Aluminum is a great conductor of electricity, so it's not a great material to hoist way up into the air on the end of a couple of wet kite strings, in bad weather. It could be a ... erm ... shocking experience!

Black sails were still available at this stage, although the material was now that great kite-making stuff, ripstop nylon. I imagine the range of color schemes was more varied than ever before, by this time.

Post Millennium (2000 onward)

A little birdie told me that Mr Powell gave up selling the design altogether, back in 2006. I suppose serious historians rely on more than little birdies, but anyway.

The value of these old kites, some of which are still lying around forgotten in cupboards and old sheds, continues to rise. In fact, it's getting harder to put your hands on one now. If you try a search on eBay, you might just have to make do with a poster showing some Peter Powells in flight... Perhaps people are hanging on to them, now that the value of a flyable original is climbing past US$100 or so in 2009!

Kite flyers still reminisce about the Peter Powell stunt kite online in forums and other meeting places. A handful of kids are lucky enough to have a genuine original that was once flown by their father or even grandfather. The excitement reverberates around, with talk of how easy they were to fly and how impressive those long tails were. Some of the kites that are still flyable limp into the air with packing-tape patches.

The Peter Powell stunt kite lives on!

2014

Once again, genuine PP kites were being manufactured. This time it was from a design by Peter's sons, although the concept stayed true to the original. The PP MkIII is pricey but a very good kite, I can assure you from experience! See below.

AN UPDATE: We have now had the pleasure of flying this kite. It's very durable, and easy to assemble and fly in a wide range of wind strengths. A little more care and skill is required in strong winds, of course.

Aren, aged 13, flew our PP MkIII over sand while I took some video. See him just having fun:

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