High flights with kites
What's high?
Please respect the legal height restrictions for flights with kites in your region. Especially near airports or helicopter landing places, fly only with a short flying line or not at all.
Some law applies to kite flights:
- Germany: maximum 100 m line
- Switzerland: maximum altitude 60 m
- other countries: similar laws
At kite festivals, but not each one, the organizers are trying to get height clearings, often with a big effort, to enable legal high flights. Just ask how high you can go.
Braided Dyneema lines are very strong. A zero.4 may be torn in an emergency, a zero.5 not. So be careful close to streets and also pay attention to bikes that often circle around you, especially kids.
Usually don't fly:
- higher than 60 m=180 ft or with longer lines than 100 m
- near airports, roads, powerlines, and railroads or in stormy weather
- take care of people and stay away from trees, which will eat your kite
A stabilizer™ with one of the 3 De tomaso or The urban ninja ul, makes the flight of a light-wind or zero-wind kite almost static when flying high with a long line. De tomaso volante is probably best suited for flying in some wind too.
Even higher
There are several high altitude world records with single kites or multiple kites connected to series. The effort is considerable, administrative (airspace), physical, temporal (also the time window) and financial. Situative dependencies determine anything (wind in any altitude layers, weather). The kites at these high altitude world records were large to very large and not really light.
We would also be interested in how it would be flying high with modern precise materials and smaller, accurately built kites on ultralight wafer-thin dyneema flying line. Still, most external factors remain the same. And without electronics, batteries etc. of course.
Low and slow
The short flying lines on Microwider™ are so handy that you often don't need a long line at all. They are 20 m long and laid out and wound back quickly. The contact to the kite is always crisp and you have no problems with twisting or chaotic knots.
Since the whole line lies on the ground and there is no mass at the end (like usually the reel with the long lines), you can move freely without sudden unpleasant tensions. A cool and safe method for urban zero wind flights.