Peter Powell
Kite-maker who created the steerable stunt-kite in the 1970s
PETER POWELL, who has died aged 83, developed the first two-line steerable kite, selling millions worldwide and sparking a stuntkite flying craze.
His interest began in the 1960s when he was trying to help a young cousin fly his new kite – a traditional diamond-shaped kite with a string tail. “The wind was wrong, either too low or too high, and he was so disappointed,” Powell recalled. “From that moment forward I became obsessed with creating a kite that would fly in any wind.”
Two years after he began experimenting with different designs he patented his first kite – a sixfooter – with which he went for a world record of highest-flying kite: “The lines snapped and I lost the kites.”
After that he decided to go bigger and made 30ft kites and sat a 70-year old woman on a swing seat suspended from seven of the kites as they rose from the ground. The stunt was filmed by the BBC and his doughty guinea pig earned a Charlie Chester award for providing public amusement.
One day Powell was flying one of his 6ft kites and noticed a list to one side which he tried to correct by attaching a separate line to the other side. It caused the kite to loop, so for fun he attached a third line and found he could loop the kite to right or left. Then, one night, he thought about removing the centre line and just tethering the kite with two lines on either side: “To my greatest relief the kite controls behaved intuitively... The lines did not lock together and the kite [carved] arcs in the sky.”
After two more years of hard work, in 1972 he launched the 4ft steerable stunt kite on to the market. The kites came with a long, hollow polyethylene tail that was inflated by the wind, making them stable and adding to the visual effect as they performed stunts.
To begin with Powell sold his kites from the back of his car, then began to advertise them by flying the kites over the sea front at Paignton. A breakthrough came in 1975 when his kites were featured on the BBC’s
Nationwide programme. As orders skyrocketed, Powell opened new factories to produce 75,000 kites a week.
“It quickly swept across the whole world,” he recalled. “Before then, only children had flown kites, but after that everyone had them.”
In 1975 he won a silver diploma at the Exhibition of New Inventions and Techniques in Geneva. The following year his kite was chosen as toy of the year by the British Association of Toy Retailers. By the late1990s, however, profits had started to dwindle and – believing his kites had had their day – he set fire to more than half a ton of equipment. In the meantime, however, his sons, Mark and Paul, had started to develop their own, revamped, take on his classic model, and in 2014 Powell and his sons launched an online shop with a new retail outlet in Cheltenham.
“Having a kite is freedom,” said Powell. “You’re up on the hilltops in the open air. There is no better feeling.”
Peter Trevor Powell was born in Gloucester on June 29 1932 and educated locally. After National Service in the RAF as a mechanic working on Gloster Meteors, he had a variety of jobs, before founding a company which specialised in painting white lines on roads. It was during this time that he started to experiment with kite designs.
Powell’s wife Christine predeceased him. He is survived by his two sons and four daughters. Peter Powell, born June 29 1932, died January 3 2016