What goes up must come down — as Dr. Phillip Jones found out just eight minutes after his magnificent 15-foot 'Chairman Mao' crown kite had wowed spectators and judges at the recent 42nd annual Smitsonian Kite Festival in Washington, DC.

A regular entrant in the competition which attracts participants from all over the world, the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital Emergency Department physician had spent months planning and assembling the materials for a complex design that would then take his every spare moment for six weeks to make, in addition to overcoming a nail-biting sequence of set-backs on site in Washington.

With this year's theme being 'China — Brushstrokes in the Sky', Dr. Jones felt artist Andy Warhol's famous painting of Chairman Mao would make the perfect illustration, and to show it off to best he chose to build a rarely-seen 'crown' kite based on an original design by Alexander Graham Bell.

Anyone familiar with his kitemaking concepts knows that they are never simple, and are as much about engineering and physics as size and sewing — lots and lots of sewing, in fact, all of it done by himself on a home sewing machine.

"The panel is just art, but the style and structure is engineering. I love that marriage, which is what kites are, and that's why they appeal to me. My dad is an engineer and pilot," Dr. Jones says.

Each year, the Irish-born prize winner comes up with something more challenging, but it is fair to say that his 2008 model was in a class of its own. Fifteen feet in diameter overall, with a centre panel eleven feet in diameter, the finished kite included 531 separate pieces, including 48 triangular pieces in two different styles, 96 carbon fibre sticks, 172 reinforcement patches, each one individually cut out and sewn on, 172 cable ties and 72 hand-made fittings.

"A total of 298 square feet of sail area — big!" Dr. Jones says. "One of the judges was laughing because I was the smallest guy there with the biggest kite. There was another guy who was really big — about six foot six inches — whose kite was about one centimetre square, and we flew them at the same time."

As always, the kite enthusiast took infinite care and prepared meticulously before he even began to cut the fabric or sew the first stitch. Endless mathematical calculations, including the weight of every single piece of ripstop fabric, paper patterns, and more were precisely worked out. To reproduce Warhol's face of Chairman Mao was particularly fiddly because it comprised a mosaic of different colours, shapes, sizes and weights of fabric, all individually cut and appliquéd. Then there was the Warhol signature to replicate, and the yellow stars of the Chinese flag.

When it came to ordering some of the fabric from abroad, Dr. Jones discovered that certain colours were discontinued. Having written to every sail loft in the US in search of a key orange colour without success, one man made it his personal mission to find it, which he did in Sri Lanka, while the flesh colour for Chairman Mao's face was located in New Zealand.

Meanwhile, through an internet kite-building site, Dr. Jones found a fellow enthusiast who designed and made the all-important fittings into which the supporting carbon fibre spars would be inserted. Other parts of the overall preparation included cutting the Warhol poster of Chairman Mao into pieces and scanning them, one by one, into his computer, where Dr. Jones then reassembled them into one image using Photostop, and condensed the colours down to five.

Bearing in mind the 11-foot diameter of the circle, how to project a slide of the image onto the fabric proved another challenge, overcome finally by taping the fabric to the backstage wall at City Hall theatre, then carefully tracing the outline of every component and ultimately marking the various coloured areas with coded stickers, almost all of which ultimately came off and stuck to everything else, including the family cat, during the sewing process.

While a fellow contestant said it took him five months to complete his kite, Dr. Jones did not start sewing until February 28, and the competition was on ....

"It was crazy. I didn't think it would take as long as it did, and in the end I was sewing 12 hours a day." The emergency department physician even swopped shifts with supportive colleagues to meet his deadline.

Finally, the huge kite was done, but with no time to make the customary travelling bag for it, it was friend Kevin Blee to the rescue with the perfect solution: a moulded golf bag case, and off to Washington Dr. Jones went.

This year, for the first time, his friend and fellow physician from Canada was unable to join him, so he was on his own. Nevertheless, willing hands from passers-by helped to assemble the kite on site, and by 1.15 p.m. on competition day it was ready. Then disaster! As it was being lifted up preparatory to flying, a sudden gust of wind caught and twisted it, breaking four fittings and four spars. No problem, Dr. Jones happened to have four spares of each. Then it was discovered that a fifth spar was also broken. Panic! It was of a specific weight and size. The clock was ticking, and the Masters' segment of the competition was fast approaching when someone volunteered to go and find one. Meanwhile, ex-Marine Harold Ames appeared, and from the depths of his kit he pulled out what appeared to be the perfect duplicate, but alas it was a little too short.

"So near and yet so far," Dr. Jones thought.

Then Mr. Ames found another stick which was perfect, and the two men frantically rerigged the kite. It was 1.58 p.m., and the competition ended at 2 p.m. on a gusty day, when what this type of kite needed smooth, even air. At last, a miracle.

"As we launched, the wind smoothed out and up it went — beautifully. There were others who had watched it being assembled for three hours, and when it flew a big round of applause went up," Dr. Jones relates.

"Competition rules are that must fly at 100 feet for five minutes, and it was doing its thing and Chairman Mao was looking right at me. Then the wind shifted 180 degrees and I was getting a bit tense. It then swung the other way, and the wind was getting gusty again as it hovered on the edge of the roped off area. I didn't want it going out over the crowd so I was fighting with it. I had forgotten my gloves, the 300-lb. test polyester and nylon rope was cutting into my hands, and all the time I was thinking, 'This is going to go into the crowd' so I wouldn't let it go. I got third-degree burns."

Suddenly, there was a sickening crushing and cracking sound, and the great kite fell ignominiously to Earth, a twisted, imploded wreck which fortunately missed the crowd by a mere eight feet.

"The rise and fall of Chairman Mao," Dr. Jones quips. "Everyone was gutted for me, but I was thrilled. Twenty minutes beforehand, I didn't think it was going to fly after taking it all the way to Washington and all for the sake of one spar."

But as Shakespeare said, "All's well that ends well", and so it proved for the "smallest guy with the biggest kite" when it was announced that Dr. Jones was the overall winner of the entire competition.

"They announced the third, second, and first place winners and I didn't get a mention, so I thought maybe crashing wasn't acceptable and it just wasn't my year," he recalls. "There are three big prizes, two of which are People's Choice and Theme Award, and I thought maybe I'd get one of them, but no. Then they announced the Grand Prize winner, and it was me!

"This was my first year in the Masters' division, and those guys are the crême de la crême of kite builders in the world. There were some really beautiful kites there and I was just hoping to place. It's the best thing I've ever built. Maybe the Chinese will ask me to fly it at the Olympics."

Meanwhile, the handsome Grand Prize plaque features a working clock — a reminder to the winner that it's time to think about next year's entry, perhaps.