So every now and then I spitball some frivolous and relatively achievable goals for the month. One of them for March was “Learn to fly a box kite”. I was a master of building and flying traditional diamond shaped kites when I was a kid, so I figured this would be a piece of cake especially if I skipped the building part. So I ordered One from Amazon, put it together, and waited for a windy day. I live in a place where you never have to wait long for a windy day though they are of the gusty sort. I’ve tried three different days and can’t get it higher than about 25 feet and then for less than 30 seconds. Controlling it is impossible and it inevitably makes a bee line for the ground.
So what am I doing wrong?
Did I cheap out and buy a lemon?
Is the wind just not steady enough for a box kite?
Is there some trick I should know like a differently sloped bridle or even a tail?
Am I just the Charlie Brown of flying box kites?
ETA - In case you can’t see the link in the text, here is the kite I bought.
Box kites are hard to fly because orientation to the wind is crucial during launch, but they also need to be pretty rigid with an internal structure. Your cheap generic box kite is probably too flimsy to be controllable anyway, but it takes some practice to get a box kite deployed.
Stranger
Never had any luck with them. My dad made one when I was a kid and it never flew well. I made one for my kids and it never flew well.
So this rather pointless post is merely to tell you I can’t help!
My dad would buy us a kite every spring for some reason. We never had luck with the box kites. Even the regular-shaped kites were a hit and miss. One problem is we didn’t have a good area for flying kites. There were too many trees and power lines. When we finally did get a kite up high, we kids were always in a panic that we’d lose it or it would get tangled up somewhere. Just not a whole lot of fun.
I had a box kite (with wooden dowels for supports) that would fly just fine on a relatively windy day, although I never did any tricks or anything that particularly required “control”. It didn’t fly very well in a light breeze, though. In the end, it didn’t last long after it had a hard landing on one occasion.
Interesting. We have a box kite we bought a decade ago and have never had a problem getting the thing to take right off. Granted we only bring it out on the windiest days but it leaps right into the air and can get higher when you yank the string a few times.