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Not our drones
NEW YORK, New York - On a frigid winter day at Brooklyn Bridge Park, I found myself flying a kite for the first time in 20 years.
The kite's owner and my instructor for the day was Scott Dunn, a tall, cheerful man. He handed me a remote control. It operated a complicated mechanical rig mounted with a digital camera dangling from the kite.
I used the remote to twist and tilt the contraption. With another button, I triggered the camera's shutter. In the brisk wind, I pointed the lens all over the place, snapping greedy, sloppy pictures. After some fiddling, I managed to face the kite to the Manhattan skyline.
All told, I took 54 photos in the span of just a couple of minutes. They were all blurry, wonky, except one: This was my initiation into kite aerial photography (KAP), the conservative cousin to the drone. Despite its romanticism, KAP remains a meticulous, painstaking anomaly amid today's frenzied clamor for drone technology. If drones are the rule-smashing startup of aerial photography, kites are the cautious, deliberate mom and pop shop - old-fashioned, rule-abiding, self-policing and decidedly uncontroversial. And they'd like to stay that way, thank you very much.
Now that regulations are catching up with drone tech, this eccentric, overlooked kite hobby could just be the next best way to get aerial shots legally, without causing a stir.
KAP is practiced by a small, punctilious group scattered around the world. Most appear to be men, and I am told the community is predominantly middle age and over. It's not exactly trendy - at least not yet.
One of the most well-known and respected KAPers is Charles Benton, professor emeritus of architecture at University of California, Berkeley who has published several books of kite aerial photographs and runs the KAP discussion page, an online forum that serves as a virtual town hall for the community. He is the archetypal KAPer, a outdoors fanatic who spends long hours in his garage working on kites and rigs. An addict of details, facts and figures, he is a perennially smiling mad scientist.
"Aerial photography is a way of extending our native senses," he told me over the phone. This is something we have always wanted, Benton explained. Before aerial photography, we created maps based in part on what we imagined things looked like from the heavens.
The kite was an obvious way to get eyes into the sky. In 1888, French photographer Arthur Batut attached a camera and an altimeter to a large DIY kite and launched it into the sky over the town of Labruguière. Earlier attempts to make kite photos had failed, ostensibly because exposure times on cameras were far too long - and the kites too shaky - to capture a clear image. But by Batut's time, shutter speeds had dropped to a fraction of a second. Using a fuse to set off the shutter, he captured what's thought to be the first clear aerial photograph taken from a kite: One hundred and twenty-six years later, KAP survives. Yet the number of people who even know about it, let alone do it, is still tiny.
Meanwhile, in just the space of a couple of years, drones (which are basically untethered, motorized kites) are everywhere. An off-the-shelf drone retails for just a few hundred dollars. They are simple enough to fly that a child who unwraps one on Christmas morning can have it airborne within a few minutes.
This accessibility has a downside. In January, a drunk government employee flying a retail drone from an apartment in Washington, D.C. managed to crash the aircraft into a lawn at the White House.
As a result of this rapid growth, and spurred by incidents like the White House crash, the federal government is scrambling to catch up, while people turn increasingly suspicious of drone technology. Twenty state legislatures have passed bills limiting either the public's or law enforcement's use of drones. Cities are following suit: The New York City Council is considering a bill that would ban civilian drone use anywhere in the five boroughs, entirely.
A website called NoFlyZone allows you to register the airspace directly over yours house as a no drone zone.
The Federal Aviation Administration is in the process of developing comprehensive rules for the commercial use of drones. A draft of these regulations indicates that operators will have to undergo a rigorous certification process, and will be forbidden from flying over anybody who is not privy to the operation.
Some experts worry that if the regulations are too restrictive, it could stem the growth of a potentially lucrative industry.
Meanwhile, the kite hobby has eluded both the limelight and the attendant scrutiny from lawmakers and concerned citizens.
A self-policing community, KAP holds a deep-seated belief that it is important to coexist with the rules. Kite photographers are okay with being small and safe, and this seems to work well for everyone.
Furthermore, there is no off-the-shelf drone equivalent for kite aerial photography. It's largely DIY. To the uninitiated, the hobby appears extraordinarily, intimidatingly complicated. The KAP discussion page features threads like "Using continuous drive as an alternative to interval timer shooting" and "Spring cruise control governor for consistent string tension for a kite in gusts." Even the most basic KAPing will require DIY skills.
While this might discourage some, it is part of the appeal for many KAPers. Dunn, who runs a software consulting firm by day, is no exception. He told me he is, like Benton, a tinkerer and technophile by nature.
Prior to our outing, I sent him a link to a Weather.com forecast. He gently redirected me to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Before our flight, I watched as he carefully assembled the kite and the rig. The process involved too many steps for me to count, executed in a specific order. Dunn seemed to take great pleasure in explaining the technical details of his equipment, like his hypsometer, which is like a pair of binoculars and measures the kite's altitude.
For those willing to contend with the technical challenges, kite photography actually has several advantages over drones. Realistically, they can be used for some applications drones aren't suited for.
Depending on the conditions, kites fly for longer than the alternatives. While a drone will only fly for about 15 minutes; a kite will fly as long as there's wind. To maximize this benefit, Benton combines KAP with hiking. He attaches the string of the kite to his torso and walks for hours, taking photos the whole way. Ideally, he spends "10% of my time thinking about the kite and 90% of my time thinking about the photographs - pure bliss, as I am really there to do the latter."
A kite, which is very quiet, is perfectly suited for someone with Benton's Thoreau-like devotion to the serenity of the natural landscape. "Kite flying is contemplative," he said.
On the other hand, some feel quiet could make for a stealthy aerial spying device. During the occasional flight, Scott gets approached by people concerned for their privacy.
Drones, which are noisy, have been banned from all U.S. national parks. Noise pollution is one of several concerns. Another is the risk of crashing.
Dr. John Wells is chairman of the West Lothian Archeological Trust, a Scottish organization that promotes KAP for surveying archaeological sites. "Drones are problematic," he explained by email. They are liable to crash, which could damage the dig. He added that many of the strict forthcoming drone regulations won't apply to kites.
Which is not to say KAP isn't beholden to any regulations. Operators are forbidden from engaging in any activity that endangers persons or property. If the kite weighs more than five pounds, it must be kept below 500 feet and at least five miles from any airport. These rules are decidedly sparse.
Maybe KAP could use some more regulations, I thought as I flew the kite.
The Brooklyn Bridge Park is just across the East River from the busy Downtown Manhattan Heliport. I wondered whether there was any danger of causing some kind of horrendous kite-meets-helicopter catastrophe; our kite was several hundred feet in the air. As I soon discovered, accidents have less to do with the kites themselves, and more to do with the people who operate them.
Whereas drone operators have deliberately flown into dangerous situations, KAPers work hard to mitigate risk. I found a KAP forum discussion about how to get in touch with Air Traffic Control if you plan to fly within five miles of an airport. In another, a KAPer proudly announces he avoids flying in places where the kite will distract people from operating vehicles or power tools. People mowing lawns, for instance, can't hear shouted instructions, or a kite flyer might walk backward into the path of a passing machine without warning.
Benton told me he once sacrificed a rig in order to prevent his kite from colliding with some hikers. (He had been trying to take photos of a replica Chinese fishing junk on a near windless day.)
When I flew with Scott, he positioned the kite over an empty lawn. If the kite were to come down, he explained, it would be less likely to land on something. It turns out what he was doing has a name: the safety box. In a 3,000-word essay on KAP safety, KAPer Jim Powers rates the possible risks associated with each of the 10 steps of flying a kite, from launch site selection to kite recovery.
The KAP community relishes its squeaky clean reputation, and takes pains to maintain it. The strong tradition of self-policing is evident in the online discussion pages. Benton told me that KAPers who post photos that were clearly taken from above the altitude ceiling, or too close to an airport, they will be called out for it.
"There are people who are being irresponsible with drones, and so the entire drone community is under scrutiny," said Evan Reinheimer. "If a news story got out there that somebody was flying a kite near an airport and planes had to be diverted for 15 minutes while they went and found this guy, that would be really bad press for people who fly kites in general."
Every time a drone crashes into a bystander, or a building, or the lawn of the most secure property in the world, negative attention from lawmakers and the public intensifies, and the chances that regulations will be permissive shrink. The spirit of self-policing may just be the secret sauce that has kept KAP alive for over a century.
Even if kites survive another century, they will probably never be the new drones. Kite aerial photography is complex, time-consuming and failure-prone. When I flew, I was struck by how challenging KAP can be, in the same way I was struck by how easy it is to fly a quadcopter drone (until something goes wrong). Benton explained, "There are so many aspects. There is the tinkering, going outside twice a week, the computer work."
On some sessions Benton spends as much as 90% of his time troubleshooting. "You have to understand the wind, how to pick the right kite for the wind, how to react to changes in the wind, when to take it in, when to let it out," Scott told me as we thawed out over hot chocolate after our flying session.
Any KAPer you ask will have special words reserved for the wind. It is the essential ingredient for kiting, yet it is a wild and capricious beast. If the wind isn't strong or steady, the kite won't fly; if it's too strong, the photos will be blurry, the kite could break, or the string could snap.
Several times while I was flying with Scott, the wind dropped without warning, prompting Scott to tense up and yank on the tether, generating lift. Every KAPer has lost a kite in a crash due to the wind, he said. It isn't cheap: a kit can set you back $1,000, including an inexpensive camera, not to mention the cost of the hours of tinkering required to put it together. (Drones mostly don't have this problem, since they have stabilization systems.)
To get a good photograph from a small, flapping piece of fabric buffeting around the wind, attached to the operator by nothing more than a string, an impossible-seeming number of factors have to align. The wind has to be right, the light has to be right, the rig has to cooperate, and you have to trigger the shutter at precisely the right moment. I asked Reinheimer, who has made a living as a kite photographer, if he had ever travelled to another country for work, only to find that there's no wind. "Oh, all the time," he said.
And while that might make KAP annoying for someone trying to get aerial photos efficiently, KAPers aren't just interested in the final product - they get something out of the process, and the pleasure of overcoming seemingly impossible challenges. "When it all comes together, it's amazing," Reinheimer said.
Seeing that one clear photo that I had taken, I tasted that same thrill Evan had described: the feeling of seeing one's hours of tinkering pay off, combined with the rush of simply getting lucky. That feeling is the point of KAP - rather than delivering Amazon purchases or buzzing over a neighbor's backyard.
When it was time for me to bring the kite back in with Scott, it felt like reeling in a very large fish. (After all, when there's wind, a kite wants to fly). I was worried about crashing into the trees or ruining Scott's camera. It was a bit frightening. But it also put a big smile on my face.
As Evan put it: "It's hard to have a bad day when you get to fly a kite." Then again, so are drones.
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