I’ve been part of this community for about 35 years — across just about every angle you can imagine. Recreational flier, competitor, team leader, volunteer, business owner. Working with factories, shops, designers, fliers at every level.
That kind of time gives you a certain vantage point.
One thing I’ve observed, over and over, is a pattern I’ve come to think of as a kind of glass ceiling in kiting. Not in the traditional sense — but just as real.
Kiting, at its core, is a recreational and largely amateur pursuit. The enthusiast side of it — the part many of us live in — runs on passion. And while there is a broader kite market, the segment focused on high-level flying, design, performance, and expression is relatively small.
That has consequences.
What I’ve seen, again and again: someone discovers kiting, falls in love, dives deep. Over a few years they build skill. They start to understand the language. They begin sharing — teaching, organizing, designing, leading.
g roadThey become a node.
And that’s where things start to change.
Because at a certain point — usually somewhere in that three to five year range — they run into a limit. Not of ability. Of sustainability.
There simply aren’t many avenues in kiting to convert that level of knowledge, time, and contribution into something that supports a normal life. Not the way you might find in disciplines with larger, more developed economies around them.
So a choice begins to form, whether conscious or not.
Some people scale back. They keep flying, but it becomes personal again — weekends, occasional events, less output. Some step away entirely. A few try to build something, but even then, the demands of sustaining it often pull them away from the flying and community involvement that got them there in the first place.
Over time: churn.
A five to eight year cycle where knowledge builds, peaks, and disperses. The community regenerating — often relearning things that were already worked out years before.
Nobody’s fault. Just the nature of a small, passion-driven ecosystem with limited economic infrastructure.
And then there are the outliers.
The ones who stay.
Not because it makes sense on paper. Not because it’s lucrative. Because something in them won’t let it go.
What’s worth saying plainly here: even the most prolific designers, world champions, and respected figures in this community — people whose names you know, whose work you’ve flown — have done most or all of it while holding down unrelated full-time jobs. Careers that have nothing to do with kiting. The field time, the design work, the teaching, the organizing — built on weekends and vacation days and late nights, sustained by income from somewhere else entirely. That’s not the exception at the top. For most, it’s the rule.
I’m one of the few for whom kiting itself became the primary work. That’s not a distinction I take lightly — and it hasn’t come free. It has meant choosing this, again and again, knowing the math. But this — kiting, the people, the process, the field — is where I’m meant to be. I’ve never seriously believed otherwise.
When I look around now, there are very few people left from even 15 or 20 years ago who are still actively involved in a similar way. Fewer still who are both on the field and still contributing outward.
That’s not a complaint. Just a fact.
The point of writing this is to bring some awareness to that dynamic — for those who may not see it from outside.
And to acknowledge the people who carried this forward — on both sides of that line.
The ones who built careers around it, and chose it anyway, knowing the math. And the ones who showed up for decades on weekends and evenings, quietly giving what they could while the rest of their life demanded everything else — jobs, families, children, all the weight of a full life pulling in other directions.
Both kinds of commitment built this. Neither is lesser.
The ones who gave more than was required. Who stayed longer than made sense. Who helped build what we all now move through — whether they’re still here or not.
Much of what exists in this community — the knowledge, the designs, the culture — was built by people who eventually had to step away. Not for lack of passion. For lack of runway.
So if you enjoy kiting, at whatever depth: a lot of what you’re experiencing came through that kind of effort.
And if you cross paths with someone who’s still out there — still contributing, still showing up year after year — you’re looking at a decision that got made, and remade, many times over.
That’s what it actually is.
🍻 JB