Jim Cheetham - Kites - Night Flying

Well, why not? If you will forgive the pun, it lets you see kite flying in an entirely new light.

Before you get too far into this account, one caveat - I'll be talking mostly about flying stunt kites, not single-liners. The idea of controlled constant motion is part of the challenge of flying at night for me. Don't feel left out if you're a mono-resticula flyer, though, there is something for everyone in all styles of flying!

The big difference with night flying, the thing that sets it apart from daytime flying, is the loss of some of the information you normally use. Perhaps bright moonlight has washed away all colour, and the extreme contrast has removed the normal clues for depth-perception. Perhaps down-looking lighting means you can see the ground, but not the kite above a certain height. Perhaps the lighting is such that you can no longer see the ground, yet the kite remains visible as a silhouette against the glow of light pollution, or the stars in a clear deep sky, if you're lucky. Perhaps you can see nothing at all, and rely upon the feel of the lines that you hold to tell you what is going on.

Because when you lose one of your senses, the others seem to be much sharper, as the brain tries to compensate. When you can no longer see the kite, you find your sense of touch can 'read' the position of the kite in the sky by the angle and strength of pull on the flying lines, and you can hear the kite much more clearly as it cuts through the air.

Tip: Simulate night flying any time by simply closing your eyes and carrying on as normal. This works especially well when wearing sunglasses, as no-one can tell what you are doing!

Just how you approach the experience depends upon many things, but one of the most important is the question of just how dark it actually gets at the flying field. The first time I flew at night was on a beach in England, facing the streetlights on the promenade. The kite was mostly black, with coloured flashes near the wingtips and on the spine that let the light shine through. The kite was flitting between the lights, slipping in and out of visibility.

However, most of the places I fly in these days get extremely dark at night, with no artificial lighting nearby. Because the complete Zen experience of seeing nothing can be had at any time, I usually mark the position of the kite with bright LED lights on the leading edges. I have two sets of lights (red, and green) from Fly By Night in the US of A, which consist of two lines of 5 LEDs each, powered by a couple of AA batteries. We are also beginning to make up our own sets of lights, and have even purchased at great expense two blue LEDs, just to be different. (If you don't keep up with electronics, you may not have noticed that blue LEDs are very rare, being successfully produced only in the last few years)

Tip: Windows95 users can keep track of the current phase of the moon with the shareware program, MoonPhase. This can be downloaded from the web site of Locutus Codeware.

http://www.locutuscodeware.com

Of course, there are plenty of other ways of lighting up your kite in the sky. I've seen small LEDs stitched into the leading edge of a kite, fishing float lights, chemical light-sticks and flashlights directed from the ground. Single-line kites are a lot less subject to the weight limitations that multi-line kites suffer from, and so they can carry much more complicated and powerful lights. At the Bristol International Kite Festival in 1995, I saw fireworks being launched from a pair of lifters - they seemed to be launching horizontally.

Besides flying kites at night, I've started experimenting with photographing them. I have been very disappointed with most photographs of kites in flight, as they never seem to capture the essence of movement. However, time-delay photography at night works very well indeed! For the delight and delectation of you, my web audience, I have assembled a gallery of these pictures on the next web page, Night Flying Photography.

Flying Kites at Night