We hit a major milestone by completing our first figure-eight flight. We are proud that we came to this point in just over one year after company foundation. Below is a video.
We captured several photographs showing the kite during flight. It is inspiring to see our vision turning into reality, step by step. In the first photograph below, you see the kite during launch and a nice Alpine panorama in the background. In the other photograph, you see the kite in the foreground and a blue sky in the background. In that photograph, you actually see three airplanes. One of those is a tethered electric airplane — our kite.
The next photograph below highlights how small the visual impact of a Kitekraft system is. Besides that, reducing material costs and simplifying logistics are other aspect of how we bring wind power technology to the next level.
Over the past months we have been working hard to push the boundaries of airborne wind energy technology. This milestone marks a number of achievements and is a major proof point for Kitekraftoverall approach:
- During launch, the kite was powered over the 800V tether connection. For a short time in one of the figure-eight flights, the kite even generated power, although the wind was very weak and the primary focus of the current prototype was not yet a high efficiency.
- As far as we are aware of, this is the first time ever a biplane/boxplane kite with a single tether attachment point, which flies its figure-eights via roll control, completed such maneuvers. The kite flew autonomously, only the trim was adjusted manually for this first figure-eight flight.
- Our approach to software and hardware and the general kite concept work. Indeed, the kite’s real behavior is very close to our simulation models. The next steps towards a production system are now more incremental improvements instead of risky novel developments.
We now started our seed round fundraising after presenting on Y Combinator’s Demo Day. TechCrunch featured us in their article and showed our figure-eight flight video. Feel free to drop us an email invest@kitekraft.de.
In the coming months, we will turn our prototype into an efficient demonstrator that is able to fly 24/7 and generate power at various wind speeds and weather conditions. Stay tuned!
