Whilst surfing the net this morning I was pleased to note that ‘The Kite Society of Great Britain’ website has been updated to reflect the UK legislation currently in force. My thanks go out to the site’s webmaster for making these changes.

By the way if you are a kite flyer I would heartily recommend joining the KSGB. The fees are comfortably low, particularly if you want family membership, and well worth it for the quarterly issues of ‘The Kiteflier’ magazine alone. Though the discounts and festival carpark access do help.

Meanwhile there is still no mention of the legislation on the ‘British Kite Flying Association’ (BKFA) website. Follow the ‘Resources > Legal and Regulatory’ links in the site menu and you get a blank page. For an organisation that claims amongst its aims:

  • To achieve national recognition as a body representing all codes of kiteflying and to work with regulatory bodies and organisations to ensure that the interests of all kiteflyers are represented.
  • To promote safe flying and to provide model codes for health and safety for clubs and kiteflyers to adopt.

this is absolutely abysmal. In fact, follow any of the links to any of the pages and documents on the site, and you will not find a single mention of legislation relating to kite flying, though will find mention of child protection legislation. Come on people you claim to be a kite flying organisation wanting to be our national representative body, not a child protection body, live up to your aims and produce a website that supports and informs the sport of kite flying, or take the site down. All the current website does is make you and in turn the rest of the UK kite flying fraternity look like a bunch of incompetents, which is not the image the sport should be giving to regulatory bodies and organisations, particularly when we are having to fight to gain and retain access to flying grounds. Just where is the BKFA’s support for Chris Dowie’s campaign? Highly conspicuous by it’s absence, that is where it is. As an organisation purporting to support and represent all kite flying in the UK, the Free the Fields should be on the site’s homepage, not absent from the whole site. Shame on you.