Dogs are totally pro-kite. Stephanie, Tom, myself, and our entranced canine audience. All ground photos courtesy of Stevie

What I want to do

We joined a group of concerned citizens and folks from UW Stout in Augusta, WI to show a little bit about kite aerial photography and photograph a frac sand mine southeast of town on highway M.

View Larger Map

My attempt and results

We could only get within a kite in the air from ~1000 meters from the facility. So we decided to use a Redstone Rig and take oblique imagery instead of a soda bottle.

Winds were blowing West Northwest at 9-12mph, pushing our kite farther away. So I clipped both kite tails on our Dazzle Delta to the left hand side and flew the kite roughly 20 degrees off wind, flying just slightly south of West in a West Northwesterly wind.

The kite was stable but a little jumpier than usual with a less steady pull. It required more attention to maintaining consistent tension while letting line out. It flew at a lower angle and had about 1/3 less lift. But we had the wind, and were able to get a full 1500 feet of line out. I made this panorama of the mine and its ponds in photoshop:

Why I'm interested

This is my first time deploying off-wind flying in the field at a high altitude. I'd done a bunch of tests and was confident in the technique, and it was great to see how well it worked. The three tail attachment points of the Dazzle Delta and its ability to be rigged to fly off wind was one of its attractive features for inclusion in our kit, and I'd like to move to recommend it as a normal flight technique with our kite kit.

Next Steps

there are other techniques that are more involved for flying off wind that may get a greater angle than 20-30 degrees. Paul's fishing kites. US kite fishing.