Fighter Kites: Finding the Path of Least Resistance

The fighting kite is a small, squarish, often tail-less kite with a nearly flat dihedral angle. The dihedral is simply the angle or shape of the kite along its horizontal axis. Like kites, birds have a variety of dihedral angles that they use when they are gliding or soaring. If you have ever seen a Turkey Vulture soaring on thermals caused by hot air rising, you have seen their wobbly flat dihedral wings in action. The broad dihedral angle of the Turkey Vulture's wings makes them unstable when soaring, which is why vultures depend on thermals to soar and as a rule do not soar much on days when no thermals exist. The ground must be warm for thermals to occur, which limits where and when soaring is possible for a vulture. A bird that makes a much sharper dihedral angle with its wings, like the Peregrine falcon, can make very precise turns in mid-air and dives with pinpoint accuracy. For a kite, the same principle holds. The greater the dihedral angle the more responsive the kite will be to being steered by its string. But unlike with birds, the speed and quickness of the kite are actually sacrificed for greater control. To have a fast diving kite you must sacrifice some control.

In fact, the cardinal rule for controlling fighter kites is that you do not pull back on the string when the kite is headed for the ground. Your instincts tell you to take control by pulling on the string whenever the kite is about to crash, but in reality you need to do the opposite. When you're about to crash, you need to relax your string. Here's why.

You don't really steer a fighter kite. Its shallow dihedral makes it fly erratically in the air. But with practice you can learn how to maneuver and harness this chaotic movement. The prowess of the fighter kite is its ability to make quick uncontrolled dives which make fighter kites much faster and aerobatic than any other kind of kite.

Here is how it works. If you had a perfectly flat kite and you tried to fly it you would discover that it would not fly properly, it would only spin around on its string in the air. Without a dihedral the kite would be unable to orient itself in the direction of the wind. A kite with a dihedral will naturally orient itself with the direction of the wind because physics dictates that the path of least of resistance is with the wind, not against it. The behavior of a weather vane demonstrates this very well.

Imagine two sheets of plywood standing up on end, and then imagine one facing the wind and the other facing to the side perpendicular to the wind, so that its edge is facing into the wind. The sheet of plywood facing into the wind will be blown over, while the sheet facing away will remain standing because it has taken the path of least resistance. Kites that have strong dihedrals take this path and are the easiest most stable kites to fly.

Fighter kites fundamentally do not take the path of least resistance. Their weak dihedral design makes them prone to instability.

To fly a fighter kite you must learn how to direct this spinning. To do this you launch the kite and allow it to begin spinning, letting out string gradually at the same time. Observe how the kite spins. Then, in the instant when the nose of the kite is pointing up, pull back on the string. You should know that in general pulling back on the string will increase the wind resistance of the kite which will make the kite fly faster in whichever direction it happens to be pointing. If the kite happens to be pointing towards the ground when you pull back it will fly straight into the ground.

Bit by bit, by only pulling back on the string only when the kite is pointed skyward, your incremental movements will make the kite begin climbing higher in the sky. Through repeated pulling on the string, at just the right time, the kite will begin flying. To turn the kite or make it dive, simply let off on the string, watch as the kite begins to spin, and then pull when it is pointed in the direction you want it to go in.

Just remember that when your kite is headed into the ground, let up on the string. Don't pull back when your kite is about to crash.

Traditionally fighter kite string is rubbed with powdered glass. A well timed dive can cut an opponent's kite string in two. India's national day for celebrating kite fighting is January 14. On that day millions of kites, made in a traditional style from paper, are flown. A kite that has its string cut loses the contest and children race to recover the fallen kites to keep for themselves. In India, fighter kites have been mass produced for centuries on this day.

Fighter kites are popular elsewhere in the world where their spread was probably due to the arrival of European trading ships in the sixteenth century. There are signs of Dutch and Portuguese influence on the fighting kite traditions in Indonesia, Chile, and Japan. For example, the earliest Japanese depiction of a fighting kite is actually a picture of some Indonesian children flying a kite from a trading center. Red, white, and blue, the traditional colors used in Japanese fighting kites also happen to be the colors of the Dutch flag. The association between Japanese fighting kites and maritime flags is extended to in the traditional Hata designs for the kites, many of which mimic the design of signal flags that were used on trading ships. Hata actually means flag in Japanese. The glass encrusted string, or cutting line, is called the bidoru in Japanese, and bidoru is Portuguese for glass.

References: David Gomberg, The Fighter Kite Book (Cascade Kites, 1992)