Giant triangular hang gliders lift riders over the dunes at Jockey’s Ridge State Park. Colorful, semicircular kites pull board riders across Pamlico Sound. Sophisticated stunt kites zigzag in the skies over the Wright Brothers National Memorial.
More than 120 years after Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the world’s first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, the spirit of flying is alive and well on the Outer Banks, thanks in large part to Kitty Hawk Kites. Founded 50 years ago with a mission to share the joy of flying, the outfitter is one of the largest hang-gliding schools in the country. It has also branched out to offer other flight-related activities, like kiteboarding, parasailing, aero tours, kite competitions and festivals, and even flights on a replica of the Wright brothers’ 1902 glider.
It all started with a photograph. As an engineer working in Winston-Salem in 1973, Kitty Hawk Kites cofounder John Harris saw a picture in the Winston-Salem Journal of a man flying a Rogallo wing, a precursor to the hang glider. “That was an epiphany for me,” he says. “I’d always wanted to fly, and here was a simple flying machine. I literally couldn’t think about anything else.”
He tracked down the man in the photo and had him ship a hang glider to North Carolina. Harris and his friends tested it on Jockey’s Ridge in Nags Head, running up and down the dunes, strapped into the hang glider, until they figured out how to maneuver it to change the speed and lift — a process very similar to the Wright brothers’ test flights in gliders on the dunes of the Outer Banks.
“There is tremendous joy in being outside and interacting with the wind,” Harris says. “Not only is it exhilarating, but it also changes your outlook and gives you more confidence. If you can fly, you can do anything.”
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By the summer of 1974, Harris had stunned his mother, colleagues, and friends by moving to Nags Head to open a hang-gliding school with his friend Ralph Buxton. The sport was unfamiliar to most of the area’s residents, having only started to develop in the 1960s, but Harris was undaunted in his mission. That same summer, he took another giant leap as the first person to hang glide off Grandfather Mountain.
The location of the school at Jockey’s Ridge was pivotal. “The Wright brothers came for wind and sand — that’s why they were here and why we are here,” says Billy Vaughn, co-manager of the Kitty Hawk Kites Hang Gliding School at Jockey’s Ridge. “Francis Rogallo, who invented the flexible wing in the 1940s, had been testing his invention here since the 1960s and called [the Outer Banks] a ‘natural wind laboratory.’”
Fifty years after its humble beginnings in a small garage across the street from Jockey’s Ridge, Kitty Hawk Kites operates six recreation centers and 28 retail stores. They’ve expanded the sport of kiteboarding and turned people of all ages on to kite flying. And they’ve trained more than 1,200 hang-gliding instructors, who, in turn, have taught more than 400,000 people to hang glide.
“It’s been an honor that we’ve been able to continue to teach people to fly and glide, which is what the Wright brothers spent most of their time doing here — learning to fly gliders,” Harris says. “We feel like we are continuing in their footsteps.”
For more information on Kitty Hawk Kites and its locations, visit kittyhawk.com.
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