The Allegory of the Kite By David Rose When Dawn and I went to the beach for a day several weeks ago, we tried several times unsucessfully to fly our kite. The problem seemed to be that it tended to turn to the left, which if unchecked led to its crashing dramatically into the ground on the left side. Again and again we tried to launch this thing. Dawn would stand back holding the kite, and I would try various lengths of string to start with. I pulled the kite and it immediately took to the air--plenty of wind--and it would go straight up into the air as I let out the string. Inevitably, it would begin to turn to the left, though, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. When the kite was low enough, I could pull the string hard to the right and usually correct the problem before the kite hit the ground. However, once it rose past a certain point, the direction in which I pulled the kite string had little to no effect, and pulling on the string at all simply made the kite fly faster in whatever direction it was flying (usually straight towards the ground, on the left). We finally packed up the kite in frustration. Must be the direction the wind is blowing in, I told myself, knowing full well that it made no difference to the kite once it was off the ground. So it must be a fatal flaw in the construction of the kite, I decided. The kite would never fly. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I realized an important point in the physics of flying a kite. Pulling on the string makes it go faster, yes--so what happens when you relax the string? No longer held against the wind, the kite begins to be carried on it like a loose piece of paper, and begins to fall slowly. But the kite is shaped something like a broad A-frame, an obtuse isosceles triangle. Wouldn't it tend to level out as it fell? I tried to launch the kite again a few minutes later. This time, when it began to slide to the left, I relaxed the string instead of trying to pull it to the right. The kite instantly stopped flying left and levelled out as it began to fall. Once it was level--just a half-second or so, really--I pulled the string harder and up it soared, far higher than it had ever been before. A few repetitions of this trick had the kite soon at the end of its string, almost higher than I could see. I don't know what the moral of the story is. But I felt pleased to have seen the solution and applied it.