The Flight of The Millibar Messenger

You Are Here:

Home >> The Flight of The Millibar Messenger

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine June 2001

Page:

The Flight of The Millibar Messenger
Richard Synergy is taking kite flying to new heights—14,509 feet, to be exact.
By Michael Cannell Photographed by Patricia McDonough

AT EIGHT O'CLOCK on a summer morning, Richard Synergy parks his blue 1987 Dodge station wagon in a farmer's wheat field a few miles outside the southern Ontario town of Kincardine and begins unloading a preposterous jumble of gear: sewing machine, rubber mallet, work gloves, electric drill, carabiners, bundles of fiberglass spars, and two gas-powered generators capable of putting out 6,600 watts. "Nice clean current," he says with a tender pat. "Ripple-free."

Synergy reaches into the well-scuffed interior of the car‹this time with a certain decorousness, as if helping a high-heeled starlet from the backseat—and retrieves the pink-and-black nylon skin of the Millibar Messenger, a 17-pound, single-string delta kite with a 30-foot wingspan, which he designed and built himself. "I'm as nervous as a pregnant nun," he says. "Totally uptight and very mission-oriented."

His mission? To send the Millibar Messenger higher than any other single-string kite in the history of flight. In service to this, Synergy has slept a fitful ten hours over the previous three nights and worked without dinner until 11:30 the previous evening fine-tuning his equipment. "There's no time for meals in this operation," he explains. Instead he's subsisted on boxes of vanilla-flavored Resource Standard, a nutritional drink for invalids.

It seems to be doing the trick. Synergy looks far younger than his 63 years. Dressed in a purple T-shirt and baggy hiking shorts, his arms and shoulders tanned from years of outdoor carpentry, he moves with the ticking energy of a hyperactive camp counselor. He lifts a yellow plywood box the size of a large doghouse off the trailer behind the car to reveal his homemade winch, a Rube Goldberg contraption gaudy with voltage meters, circuit boards, and 25,000 feet of Kevlar line spooling through a labyrinth of pulleys. He swings the winch around to face downwind, hooks it up to one of the generators, and gives it a test whirl by tweaking a black knob marked "takeup." "If the line breaks," he says, watching the winch spin in place, "it's a $3,000 mistake."

There is a ground crew of sorts, 12 kite-flying friends and ham-radio operators who have come to help lift stuff and basically stare. If the line snaps, the guys with the ham radios will disperse to locate the errant kite by pointing their parabolic antennas at the flashlight-size radio beacon attached to its nose. The hammies are beginning to trickle in now, half of them retired duffers in shorts and baseball caps. They're hoping for an electronic foxhunt. Back in 1991, they tracked one of Synergy's runaway kites for three hours as it flapped more than 20 miles downwind. Another fugitive kite was never found, despite classified ads placed in newspapers within a 50-mile radius and the aid of a Toronto psychic, hired by Synergy, who claimed to "see" the kite lying by a fence in a farmer's field. "Kincardine is surrounded by farms," Synergy says, "so that didn't help a whole lot."

It takes about five hours of futzing, but by 1 p.m. the kite is ready. Synergy thrusts two Casio wristwatches equipped with altimeters into a neon-green nylon bag stuffed with protective plastic foam and tiny battery-powered lightbulbs (to keep the chips in the watches from freezing) and secures it to the kite's underside. This is the all-important payload; there can be no way of knowing the altitude unless the Casios return to earth safely. After making a few last-minute adjustments and strategically arranging his crew to guide the kite during takeoff, Synergy flips the switch on the winch. It rumbles like a flat tire as it reels in line—.thunka-thunka-thunka—and within seconds the Millibar Messenger is fluttering at 1,000 feet. He quickly reverses the winch and begins paying out four feet of line a second. "C'mon, kite!" he shouts. "That's it, baby! Take the line! Take it! Get up into some good air! Catch something!"

Synergy assumes his position beside the winch like a captain at the helm. He'll stand here for the next nine hours, squinting into a Magic Markerblue sky.

Page: