This was on the Discovery Channel last night, currently(or as of the taping of the show), you need somebody with a remote control to fly the kite. They said they were working on making everything autonomous - which will most likely be one of the more difficult challenges for this project.
On the discovery show, it seemed pretty loud too. An annoying buzzing sound...not sure where they're planning on deploying these, but noise pollution might be an issue, not to mention potential crash safety issues.
Check the FAQ. It has the same noise level as a wind tower, which is already pretty quiet, but at a higher frequency and higher up, so the sound will dissipate more.
The noise info presented in the FAQ is pretty useless - noise from conventional wind turbines depends on wind speed, hub height and distance - saying that the level from the AWT is "consistent with conventional wind turbines" is meaningless.
It may be that they haven't done any noise testing at this stage (and the IEC 61400-11 standard for wind turbine noise testing is really not applicable to the AWT configuration) but they would have been better off just saying something like "we'll get back to you on that" rather than setting up expectations that might turn out to be unrealistic.
Yes, it's not just the volume of the noise, it's the nuisance: constant buzzing noises (especially high-frequency ones) are much more annoying than random 'household' noises, even if they are not as loud. I would have thought though that for safety and commercial reasons the wind farms would be built some distance away from population centres.
Ah, that's a neat movie. I don't know why it isn't on the front page of their website.
Still, the fact that they've got it working once doesn't mean the problem is solved. You need it to work all the time, in all sorts of weather conditions, and automatically stow itself if conditions become unsafe. Failure means plowing into the ground, which is probably going to be expensive each time it happens.
I'm sure they'll never get the plow-into-the-ground rate down to zero, but there's gotta be a lot of work still to be done to get it as small as possible.
I really don't see Flickr's (or Forrst's) approach a "trick" or feature. I think most deployment techniques come out of a desire NOT to deploy like Flickr(or Forrst).
