Archive of old forum "KiteTypes" to March 5, 2014

1. Welcome to KiteTypes                            May 22, 2011
   Welcome All to KiteTypes.
   
   Have fun declaring a kite type that has not yet had a start in the
   group. Use search to explore if a type has been started or not.
   
   And be sure to extend the discussion by reply for an already started
   kite type. "Type" is broadly interpreted.
   
   Best of drag and lift to all,
   
   JoeF

This type of kite is found to have its wing set dominantly using paper that is used commercially in wrapping fast foods. Some specialists will seek papers that have printed logos on the papers, so that the type is easily observed.   Photographs of this type of kite are invited.  Upon looking at the kite, one will readily exclaim, "This kite seems to be made of fast-food papers!"       A specialist in this type of kite might have a collection of kites where each kite shows itself featuring one fast-food company, distinct from other companies.   One might sculpt a collage of papers from different companies all on one kite sail.

Someone might develop a relationship with a fast-food company via a kite program that uses this type of kite.

Give a high second use to those hamburger wrapper papers!  Subway sandwich paper wrappers! Etc.      Did your kite of this type get displayed at the local library or in the window of  fast-food company?    

Small kite of this type?    Large kites of this type?   Etc.

3.  Shirt kites
 

Have human shirts that convert to be the sails of kite wings.  The set of possible kites using wearable shirts belong to the the type of kite called shirt kites.    Flat shirt kites, delta shirt kites, inflatable shirt kites, cellular shirt kites, train of shirt kites, etc.  

Wear a set of shirts in layers as needed for weather or event service or demonstration, etc. Then take the shirts off, perhaps unzip to obtained designed sail result. Involve tether and resistive set and fly!

Plans, photos, applications, etc. for shirt kites are invited. Full development of this type of kite are welcome to this thread.

Perhaps a kite pilot will wear to the field ten shirt kites in layers.   Give or sell and fly the "shirt off your back" to bless others and the sky!

And what is meant is very different from just the packaged kite-shaped tee-shirt: Simply-packed-as-a-kite-shape shirt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trousers

Kite wings made from trousers, especially wearable or worn trousers form a type of kite. Consider a wide spectrum of options. A trousers may be made of low-mass rip-stop nylon; a person might wear several such trousers at once with one trousers over the others. The effective kite wing from trousers might be accomplished by inflation tatics or parting and flat-sailing the parts.  Multiple trousers might assemble to form a wide parafoil-like wing.     Room for much creativity!

Practical trousers actually used for clothes would be taken off and flown as kite wings.

Trousers of various textile weight could also be used in wing tailing or tether laundry.  Trousers kites may be mounted into kite trains or kite arches.    

A trousers kite might be used to sky drop gift trousers for people to receive on the ground for clothing.

Open for development!   Plans, flight photos, varied completions, or applications?

There are the really practical trousers that become trousers kites.

Then there are artistic kites that appear to be trousers; this is a subset of trousers kites.   
http://www.eborg3.com/Facebook/043-Kite-Pants.jpg

At least two subsets of pants kites:

• Really practical worn pants that become kite wings.
• Artistic kite wings that mimic pants.   http://www.longbottom.org.uk/gallery.html

Unisex pants kites

Male pants kites

Femail pants kites

Underwear pants kites

Outerwear pants kites.

Plans, photos, applications, etc. are invited for this type of kite.    Tails, trains, arches, singles, inflateds, flats, single surface, etc.

These come in a variety of subtypes.

For one subtype, see large sectors of hang gliders where the short kite lines tether the kite's wing to the pilot. The pilot's body mass pulled by gravity and affected aerodynamically by the apparent wind forms a resistive system to maintain tension on the kite line. As the resistive set moves through the sky, so does the tether and the kite's upper wing.   See http://www.WorldHangGlidingAssociation.org  for some leads to human-carrying free-flight gliding kites.

Another subtype in the major type "human-carrying free-flight gliding kites"  would have the human as passenger in either the upper wing or in the lower opposing resistive wing in a kite system using two wings connected by a tether set. One aim is to control the cross-winding of both wing s to effect travel as desired.

This thread is open to advance those hang gliders that are kite systems.

Type: Purcell manned tow kite

This type of kite has human passengers in the kite wing while the wing is towed by powered boats or other powered vehicles.

Thomas H. Purcell, Jr.    http://tinyurl.com/PurcellOBITUARY [d. 2007]

Thomas H. Purcell, Jr.     Flight Dynamics (pres: Thomas H Purcell Jr.), Raleigh NC    Built flexible-wing glider.  Perhaps 1961. Details are invited.   Skysurfer Magazine of May/June 1973, page 9, published by the owner of Aeronautical Publishers,  shows Purcell with a wing that holds the mechanical inventions embedded also in the Fleep and the wing of the team headed by engineer Charles Richards. 
[[THOMAS H. PURCELL JR. Thomas H. Purcell Jr. died Oct. 13, 2007, at UNC Hospital in Chapel Hill, N.C.
 ]]

• http://www.newsobserver.com/2007/11/11/78965/engineer-flew-his-own-way.html
• http://findarticles.com/p/news-articles/progress-index-the-petersburg-va/mi_8168/is_20071017/thomas-purcell-jr/ai_n53963196/
• http://www.ncmuseumofhistory.org/collateral/articles/f03.flight.imagination.pdf    Contains the following note for study and discussion:
  "Purcell studied engineering at North Carolina State University. In 1961 Purcell, using photographs of Rogallo's design from a magazine article, constructed a sixteen-foot-wide glider with an aluminum frame that he tested by towing it behind an automobile at the Raleigh-Durham Airport. Purcell called Rogallo one day, and the two engineers agreed to meet. When Purcell arrived at NASA, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by engineers who were asking numerous questions about his FlightSail glider. Purcell had figured out how to do something that NASA had not�achieve stability in a towed glider. He continued to work on his glider. He replaced the wheels with floats for towing it behind a speedboat. He flew the pontoon glider for the first time at Lake Waccamaw on July 26, 1962. It worked so well that he never went back to land-based liftoffs again. This was the first water-based use of the Rogallo wing." ©2005 North Carolina Museum of History. 
  Office of Archives and History, N.C. Department of Cultural Resources              [One would have to compare the water-based use dates of the Mike Burns group that used the Rogallo wing in a kite glider in some kinds of tests in 1962-3; just when Burns' group towed the Rogallo kite-glider for the first time in tests would be pertinent to this study; Burns managed to exhibit the triangle control bar that was well recorded in 1908 in Breslau for a Breslau hang glider in the cable-stayed format with hung pilot as we still use in many hang gliders today.  So, was Purcell or Burns first over water; or indeed did any of the tow and releases of the Paresev go over a body of water ????   [ ]   ]
•  
  • Tom Purcell features his FlightSail on p. 37, April, 1962, of EAA's Sport Aviation. 
  • See note from Low & Slow No. 22 regarding FlightSail.

Thomas H. Purcell, Jr. would later patent some evolutes of his first flexible-wing kite gliders.

Patent number: 3614032
Filing date: Apr 28, 1969
Issue date: Oct 19, 1971

Click image for full patent: 

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/AirborneWindEnergy/message/3636   has a start on this type of kite.

Kite type:   Visible-tether kites   (VTK)
Kites that feature tethers that are visible to human normal eyes in dark room  or dark sky

Note: Making kite tether sets noticed by other aircraft is a challenge beyond the present type of just making tethers visible to the human eye. 

The visibility of the tethers (full set, partial set, full line, partial line) might occur from one or more of several processes, arrangements, specifications, or materials.   The visibility might be temporary, permanent, controllable, fixed, constant, oscillating, colored, color variable, method variable, method mixing, message giving, variable, binarily available, etc. Much game here!    

The tether set might have a count of one or more lines.  Invited are specifications of how to make tethers visible in the dark.

Making lines visible to human eyes in the dark of night?

• Reflection methods
• Optical fiber methods
• Chemoluminescent methods
• Phosphorescent methods
• Black-light methods
• LED ropes
• ?

Plans, photos, studies, applications, etc. are invited. Discuss.

Some starting links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorescence
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_light
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoluminescent
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflectivity
• http://image.rakuten.co.jp/1stdogcafe/cabinet/ddd141.jpg
• http://img2.topfreebiz.com/o2011-4/cache/led-rope-515587171.jpg
• ?

Click image for full patent.

 ====Click for full patent:

===== Click for full patent:

 

==Click image for full patent:

http://subvision.net/sky/planetkite/asia/cambodia/khmer-kitebook.htm

Khmer kites

wiki 

http://energykitesystems.net/Kites/ReligiousMessage/index.html

• Parafoil race kites
• Rigid-wing race kites
• Single-surface race kites
• Small race kites
• Large race kites
•  

1. Kites that feature hat art

2. Kites that mimic hats

3. Hats that function well as a hat, but also function well as a wing of a kite system. Some designers might need little or no morphing of the hat to have the hat be a wing of a kite system; other designers might end with a hat that is then morphed greatly to become the wing of a kite system.

Wear a hat that is so designed that it flies well as a wing of a kite system.

Plans, photos, comments, discussion are welcome.

Wear the hat on a trek; let the hat fly right off your head; consider even a spinal extension rod and hidden reel of kite line; unobtrusively fly the hat kite.

Here is a kite that is not a hat, but is a kite featuring art depicitng a ranger's hat: 
http://images.nitrosell.com/product_images/1/162/342173%20kite_ranger_hat.jpg

Here is a figure kite that includes a large mimic hat:
http://babesabouttown.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/cat-in-hat-kite.jpg 

http://www.balloonhq.com/column/dewey/feb03/kite18.jpg

Discuss the shown balloon hat kite.

The wearing ring surrounds the head. The tether is a long balloon. The wing is a cross kite. The inflated tail has bow knobs.  All inflated.   My guess is that the wind ought to be near zero for light action.

But this reminds me of the hat kite family that uses lighter-than-air kytoons.  Have tether connected to torso; any loosening of the hat into launch will have the kytoon hat go up into higher winds.    Consider pocket inflation from a compressed-helium tiny cartridge for morphing the kytoon hat from flatish format to inflated format and launch from the head.

The shown hat might not yet be a kite's wing, but it sure seems like a good candidate:

http://www.glowimages.com/_snippets/previewimage/index.cfm?imgid=23673131&tab=

The shown product is called "Kite hat" and is a hat that features kite images as appliques. However, someone might convert such product into a functioning kite with some detail changes and inversion.

http://doodle-heads.com/hats-3.html

Distinguishing between hat kites from kited hats. 
Of course, hats may become items of kite laundry or tailed items.

Here is an example of a kited hat that is not a hat kite:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/squishface/461496123/

Distinguishing a hat kite from a kited hat:  
Ya Jia attempts to recover her kited hat.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/squishface/461496123/

Of course, hats may become kite laundry or serve as kite-tail items.

The photo invites thoughts of human-powered flight.

the hat is just off topic. However, one could spawn a modified version of shown and come up with rotary-wing hat kites.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4055/4581528376_f828b16db2.jpg

Free-flight kite glider using only one line-set       SOL One Goes Fly    video  

A free-flight kite system for gliding and soaring is in R&D status.   This kite system aimed for the paragliding market features one major skin that wraps to form a significant short lower surfaced airfoil that brings to mind KFm-1 approximately. So, this system uses a wing that is not simply single surfaced--though single skinned--but with an important second surface for the lower part of the intended airfoil; the lower surface allows a thick airfoil where it counts.

http://www.vimeo.com/29247558

Starting discussion can be found in the replies at the introductory official video at Vimeo

Patent number: US4159087    Filed: Oct 31, 1977

Fly two or more wings separately on separate tether sets by separate controllers (human or robots or passive). Have the designs so that "joining" may occur during flight of the wings of the separate systems. Then when the wing sets of one system properly touch the wing sets of another system, then the wings join and then may be controlled as one kite system. 

• http://www.kitelife.com/old-issues/issue-66-pictorial-johan-hallin-sweden/ 
• http://www.kitelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/i66-Pictorial_003.jpg
• http://www.kitelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/i66-Pictorial_004.jpg
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/pitprops/2871176520/
• Didn't fly, but ...   
  http://question-markx.tumblr.com/
• Of course, non-dominant auxiliary use of feathers on a kite systems proliferate (on wing, kite line laundry, line sailing devices, decoration on face of wings, decoration on the kite pilot, etc.    But such uses of feathers do not seem to qualify the kite sytem as a "feather kite" type. 
• An advanced feather kite type or subtype within feather kites are wings that appear to be a full bird species using feathers, perhaps the very feathers of one bird.   Examples are invited. 
•  

• Arch of trains
• Arch of stacks
• Stacks
• Clusters
• Coteries
• Centipedes
• Domes
• Herd
• Dragons
• Flock
• Flowers
• Team
• Trees
• Arches
• Ribbon arches
• Splays
• Mesh
• Aggregate
• Series
• Trains
• Vines
• Farm of singles
• Farm of arches
• Farm of trees
• Series
• Groups
• Roots
• Gatherings
• Joinings
• Flowers
• v

Circle Wing Kite 

• Shaped and appearing as a leaf
• Real leaves as kite wings
• Real leaves gathered in various ways to make a wing cover for a kite system
• Appliqué of leaves on the wing of a kite system
• http://tinyurl.com/LeafKiteGENERAL

Notice that any kite system wrongly operated could lead to serious injury, destruction of property, and fatalities. Incidents might range from falling into a hole, disturbing vehicular traffic, cutting one's hands, triggering a huge fire or outage of power grids, etc. ... even by toy kiting improperly.