About the Webmaster (Tim)

Hi!

My name's Tim Parish, and I have a degree of interest in just about all things that fly. Ever since childhood in fact. It all started with a Primary (Elementary) School book about the Wright brothers and their Flyer.

From there, I took an interest in all kinds of flying hobbies. These included paper planes, small balsa-wood gliders, home-made plastic diamond kites, shop-bought Indian kites, and probably other stuff I've forgotten. Then I moved up to balsa-and-tissue models, control-line models and eventually radio-controlled aircraft—a mixture of powered and un-powered models.

That was the modeling side. Full-size flying also seemed very inviting, so I saved up some money as a teenager and went flying with the local gliding club. I soloed at age 15, while we were living in Alice Springs. The Red Centre as tourism brochures like to call that area of Australia.

Eventually, that led to becoming a fully qualified gliding instructor with the Adelaide University gliding club in South Australia. Lots of hours were spent in the back seat of various two-seaters, teaching people to fly or taking passengers.

Since then, I have dabbled in paragliding, hang gliding, and flight simulation as well.

I still live in Adelaide, now with a wife and son who feature in some of the pics on this site. Small kids grow up so quickly, don't they. Various pages documented his growth quite well, during the single-digit years!

For more than a decade, I labored over dozens of kite designs. Not to mention the field-testing.

A hard job but someone had to do it ;-)



Connections With Kiting

My Best Kite webmaster - Tim Parish.


While writing this, an interesting thought came to mind; four other previous flying activities besides kite-flying involved kiting a flying object up into the air. They were:

  • hand-towing a free-flying model glider into the air
  • bungee-launching a radio-controlled model sailplane into the air
  • operating a V8-powered winch with a full-size sailplane on the end of the cable
  • flying a paraglider—these aircraft are the direct descendants of the parafoil kite!

So maybe I did more kiting than I realized!



Go Fly a Kite!

That's meant in the nicest possible way of course :-)

It all started with a five dollar Baby Sled and a tiny delta made from clear plastic and four thin bamboo BBQ skewers. It came a long way from there, with the help of many other keen kite flyers from around the world who contributed to this site, right up to April 2021. The final MBK designs were 2.4 meter (8 feet) span floaters that I often used for kite aerial photography.

This site is no longer being actively developed or maintained. However, the site will stay up for years to come, as a resource for kite-flying enthusiasts everywhere. And I will continue to provide support to e-book customers, via the contact form below. Perhaps it was a fitting end-marker to the venture when the New York Times found this site and commissioned me to write a kite-making article for them. 

We hope you find the information you are looking for, here. Join others who have been inspired by this site to take up some form of kite flying. Or if you're already into it, perhaps try some new type of kite!

Keep 'em out of the trees.

  


 

Wind Speed Handy Reference

Light Air
1-5 kph
1-3 mph
1-3 knts
Beaufort 1

Light breeze
6–11 kph
4–7 mph
4–6 knts
Beaufort 2


Gentle ...
12–19 kph
8–12 mph
7–10 knts
Beaufort 3


Moderate ...
20–28 kph
13–18 mph
11–16 knts
Beaufort 4


Fresh ...
29–38 kph
19–24 mph
17–21 knts
Beaufort 5


Strong ...
39–49 kph
25–31 mph
22–27 knts
Beaufort 6


High Wind
50-61 kph
32-38 mph
28-33 knts
Beaufort 7


Gale
62-74 kph
39-46 mph
34-40 knts
Beaufort 8


 

Contact Me

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Last updated: 6 May 2021