When my son was about 8 years old, he and I belonged to the YMCA Indian Guides, which is a program for fathers and sons to do things together such as campouts, hikes, fishing trips, crafts and contests. An annual event was the kite fly, during which each father/son team would design and build a kite. Prizes were awarded for highest flier, biggest, smallest, most unusual, etc.
Just about the time that the annual kite fly was kicking off, we happened to visit a family member who was an Air Force officer. There on his coffee table was an Air Force magazine with the picture of an unusual kite-like device that the Air Force was experimenting with as a way to drop heavy equipment from cargo planes. It was a para-sail sort of thing with a double V-shape and a flexible, tough parachute material bridging across the two Vs.
I asked him if we could have the magazine, and using the pictures in it as a guideline, we made a smaller version out of rolled up cardboard and an old bed sheet. It was a relatively simple project, and it was about as hard to do as a Paris Hilton jail sentence. It took us about two hours and $2.50 worth of material. We were going to enter it in the Most Unusual category.
The day finally arrived when it was time for us to try it out. I was holding two strings and my son held the kite a short distance away. At my word, he launched it into the air and it went up about 30 feet, and then it veered over to one side and crashed. On the second try it got up to 25 feet and veered off to the other side. We tried it again and again with the same result. No mater how much I tried, manipulating the two strings wouldn’t make it fly more than a few seconds.
We went back to the workshop and I added a vertical rudder-like appendage. Still no luck. I tried about five changes and modifications (for an additional $2 worth of material) and still no luck.
It just so happened that at this time, the family member was attending a special class exclusively for Air Force officers at a local college. I called him up and reminded him of the project that my son and I were working on. I described the problems we were having with our $4.50 kite. Then I asked him to “poll” his class to see whether any of his fellow officers had worked on that project and how the Air Force had solved the problem of its instability.
A few days later he called me and said, “One of the guys in my class did actually work on that program. If you figure out how to stabilize that para-sail kite, let me know. The Air Force is having the same problems. So far they have spent over $250 million on the program and haven’t figured it out.”
P.S. We finally got our $4.50 kite to fly using three strings — one in each hand and one between my teeth. And, yes, we won the prize for the Most Unusual kite.
The Air Force spent an additional $31 million and then canceled the program.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. The opinions and comments in this column are his alone and do not represent the opinions or policies of any outside organization. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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