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Kite Personalities - Joe Hadzicki & Brothers |
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One of the most original, if not the most original, kites since the parafoil is the two-wing Revolution, conceived by Joe Hadzicki in his sleep. Hadzicki awoke with his invention fully formulated in his mind--a remarkable stroke of inventive genius. The first stunt kite controlled by four, instead of the normal two, lines, the aptly named Revolution was not in reality wholly the stroke of chance inspiration. Hadzicki had been preparing since childhood. Born in upstate New York, where his parents ran a popular restaurant in Ithaca, Hadzicki spent his boyhood pulling mechanical objects apart and making things with the parts. Hadzicki went west to California with family when his parents tired of harsh winters. Having taken an engineering degree at Santa Barbara, Hadzicki discovered kites and responded to the athletic challenge posed by large ones. With his brother Jim, a businessman, Hadzicki took a delta and repeatedly modified it, attempting to improve various aspects of its performance. Two months of experimentation convinced the brothers the basic design could not be improved on. They then let the matter rest. After a hiatus, Joe Hadzicki happened to talk with old boss from a defense firm, and the memory of their joint aerodynamic experiments got him thinking about kites again. In this context, his brain ("I'm a left-hander, we are more inventive") came up with the answer to the problem while he slept: a two-wing kite connected at the middle and guided by four lines. "I thought of an airplane with two wings and independent controls," he recalls, these to control yaw, roll, and pitch.. Joe and Jim Hadzicki built a prototype the following day that flew but quickly broke because of inadequate struts. After continuing experiments, a third brother, Dave, a golf pro, came to the rescue. Using his golf connections, he interested a maker of graphite shafts, and eventually spars sufficiently light, tiff, strong and affordable were produced. When the hundredth prototype kite survived a hundred-mph crash into the ground, the Hadzickis realized they finally had a family business ready to fly. Unveiled at the Kite Trade Association meeting in January of 1989, the three-by-nine-foot Revolution was a sensation, since it flies backward as easily as forward, can be stopped six inches from the ground after a screaming sixty-mph dive, and spins like a propeller. Large-scale order followed, although the kite retailed initially at a robust $300. It was the success story of the nineties in kiting. This article first appeared in the 1991 Kite Pin Invitational, a Drachen Foundation Publication (1995).
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