203. Inflating your kite

It seems obvious that inflatable kites need to be inflated. The question is: how much air do you put in the kite? There are three scenarios here. 1: kite is under-inflated; 2: Kite is inflated properly, 3: kite is over-inflated. When a kite is under-inflated it will be more difficult to relaunch it from the water when kite drops from the sky. When a kite is overinflated it may be damaging to the kite, especially during the impact – when they kite falls from the sky. So, it’s a good idea to inflate the kite to the proper pressure. There are different advice out there about how to estimate air pressure in the leading edge. Some people recommend to give a kind of flick and listen to the sound, others recommend to squeeze leading edge with your hands and rely on the feel of the pressure. These methods are rather inaccurate and are not reliable. Another vague recommendation is to count the number of pumps while inflating a kite. Well, since pumps exist in a variety of sizes and 100 small pumps are not going to be the same as 100 larger (taller) pumps, so let’s cross this out as well. There is also a method to set a kite on one of the Wings, keeping the kite vertically, upright, and Visually examine the Leading Edge to make sure that there are no creases. This method works well to make sure that kite is not under-inflated, but we wouldn’t know if we over-inflated the kite.