Articles

  • Teaching Kiting in a Dangerous War Zone
    When Christophe Cheret and associate Richard Poisson, both Burgundians from France, went to Hebron in Palestine last summer to teach kitemaking and flying to Arab children, they found that kiting was one of the few play activities there. The reasons have to do with the special circumstances of life in one of the most highly disputed cities in the world. Hebron has 500 Jewish settlers living, for religious reasons, in the midst of 120,000 Moslem Palestinians. Only Israeli army protection permits this to continue.
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  • Thermometers Aloft in Scotland: Using Kites to Research the Upper Air in 1749
    "“Among (Mr. Wilson’s) more advanced students...was Thomas Melville, so well known by his mathematical talents, and by those fine specimens of genius which are to be found in his posthumous papers....With this young person, Mr. Wilson lived with the greatest intimacy. Of several philosophical schemes which occurred to them in their social hours, Mr. Wilson proposed one, which was to explore the temperature of the atmosphere in the higher regions, by raising a number of paper kites, one above another, upon the same line with thermometers appended to those that were to be most elevated.
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  • Amazing Fano From the Air
    There’s no organization, no schedule, no events, few spectators. It’s not a festival. It’s just Fano— an annual gathering of many thousands of kite makers and fliers, mostly European, on nine miles of Danish hard sand beach during a week in June. Vehicles can be driven right out onto the sand and there they are used as staging points as fliers fly their kites, meet friends, and party. An island in the North Sea, Fano is well north (on a level with Copenhagen), so the sun doesn’t really set in the summer and flying goes on around the clock.
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  • Drachen Financial Aid: Hargrave Collection Being Conserved
    With financial assistance from the Drachen Foundation, the Royal Aeronautical Society of England is conserving its unique collection of Lawrence Hargrave material. An Anglo-Australian, Hargrave was a l9th century aeronautics pioneer whose fame largely rests on his invention of the box kite in l893.
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