‘After a while I was working full-time on kites. I was like the mad scientist sitting over in the corner’

San Diego resident Joseph Hadzicki, 30, spent two years hiding out in his parents’ garage, working on a kite so different from the two-stick, paper-bag model of his youth that he took out a patent. Introduced at an international kite trade show in San Diego last year, the 9-foot-wide bird can soar up to speeds of 70 m.p.h., spin, hover and dive, stopping within feet of the ground. One of Hadzicki’s “Revolution Kites,” as he calls them, is on display in the Smithsonian Institution’s aerospace museum. He also has been invited to speak in April on the kite’s aerodynamics for some computer engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Hadzicki was interviewed by Times’ staff writer G. Jeanette Avent and photographed by Vince Compagnone.

After finishing high school in San Diego and graduating from UC Santa Barbara, I worked in Santa Barbara as an engineer mostly on defense projects for two years. My boss would get these old pictures of World War II airplanes and we’d blow up the pictures and design the aircraft from the pictures. It’s reverse engineering. With a picture you can develop the aircraft.

We’d spend weeks building these things out of sticks and glue. They came out gorgeous. Then we’d hook up an engine and throw them. They’re supposed to fly up, run out of gas and then circle back down and land gently on the ground. Most of the time, of course, they didn’t. But we’d spend hours and weeks and months working on these things. It seems foolish thinking back on it because we did such intricate work right down to the details of putting the zero on the Zero fighters and the stars on the Hellcats. That experience is probably why I approached kites from the airplane point of view. That’s what I knew.

I’d also spend weekends wandering the streets of Santa Barbara, and one day I just walked into a kite store to kill an hour. I saw a picture of a person being dragged down the beach by a kite. I looked closer and could see rooster tails of sand coming out of his heels. This guy was skiing through the sand being pulled by the kite. I didn’t know whether it was fun or not, but it definitely looked exciting.

About the same time, my brother, Jim, had seen people fighting with kites on the beach, because, when they get large, they start to pull with the wind. They’re not something you really hook a little kid up to. They’re kind of a grown-up toy. He thought it would be kind of neat to grab the bull by the horns and go for a ride. So we started messing around with kites and building our own.

After a while I was working full-time on kites. I was like the mad scientist sitting over in the corner. Every day I’d have a new angle, and I’d say, “Come on, Jim, we’ve got to check this out.” I wasn’t married at the time. I was living with my parents. They were extremely supportive. You’d think they’d be saying, “Come on, you bum, get a job.” But every day they could see me out in the garage, drawing and putting something together. I just kind of hung out for two years.

Half the time I would miss dinner because I’d be out testing something. Once I get started on something, I need to finish that aspect. If I’m in the middle of a design, I can’t put it down and go eat dinner. Looking back on it, it’s shocking. But I always wanted to do something on my own.

But finally, the thing flew. When I first developed it, I understood what it was supposed to do from the design. When we actually flew it, and it performed the way it did, it was far beyond our expectations.

When we first introduced it on video at the kite convention in San Diego, people thought it was some kind of trick photography. This kite is massive; it’s 9 feet across. But it can come ripping toward the ground at 40 or 50 m.p.h., and it just stops dead and sits there as if it had hit a wall. Even if the wind is blowing 50 m.p.h., you can hold it dead still. It’s like a bull waiting to get out. The minute you bring your thumbs back on the handles, you just blast off. It’s one of the big differences in our kite over the other kites. With the other kites you have no speed control.

The kite is shaped like it is with two wings for controllability. It is designed the way it is for the same reason a bridge is trussed. It is an optimized structural design. Even though it’s a large kite, it hardly weighs anything. It’s just over 12 ounces. That’s why you can just stop it instantly.

We’ve got lots of radical designs on the board we are working on. But this design is so radically different we have to let people get used to it before we release the next one, because the next one will be one step further.

We originally called the kites Neos Omega. Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet. Neos is Greek for new. So it was the final word in new design. We wanted something exotic sounding. But people thought the “o” in Neos was a “d.” They’d say, “who’s Ned?” So we canned that. We decided to call them Revolution Kites because they’re revolutionary in design, and they have a revolving or spinning-like motion.