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Jusin Mullins
Andy Wardley blew the kite world away when he burst onto the scene, quickly becoming Britain's number-two in amateur competition. By his third year, he was ranked among Europe's elite for his deft execution of loops, dives, and climbs. Then in 2000, at the peak of his game, he stopped entering contests. "I realized that getting a higher ranking wasn't the way to prove myself," says Wardley, 34, a Web designer for Canon in Bracknell, England. "I want to usher in a new style of flying, more oriented around tricks and freestyle." His new goal: to build the ultimate competition kite.
For two years, he spent nights and weekends working on the design. He began by shutting himself in his home lab – a small room packed with computers and more than 100 kites. The first prototypes, miniature models made of matchsticks and tinfoil, eventually took over the living room. "Much to the continual dismay of my long-suffering wife, Sheila, we go months without seeing the dining table," Wardley says. The breakthrough came when a friend gave him a cheap tetrahedral kite. Wardley realized that he could adapt its pyramid shape to make a four-string, tented model – like a giant flying bra – that would provide a balance between support and responsiveness.
Wardley wrote a Perl program to find a design that maximized tension and minimized drag. He generated paper mockups on a laser printer. Each iteration took about six hours to assemble – and as little as five minutes to test. He filmed each flight, took a few notes, and began work on the next version. After 15 prototypes and some 1,200 hours of labor, the payoff is finally at hand: Wardley's masterpiece – a ripstop polyester craft dubbed the Airbow – goes into production this summer. "There's nothing that can describe the feeling of turning up at a kite festival and seeing people flying one you designed," Wardley says. Now if it can just win.
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