This is a talk I gave at the St. Francis Yacht Club on 2017-01-18 about wind powered vehicles designed to go directly downwind faster than the wind. I focus on the Blackbird in which we set a downwind record at 2.8X wind speed, and later an upwind record at 2.1X wind speed. But the gist of the talk is more about describing why it’s possible for a wind powered vehicle to go directly downwind faster than the wind when it seems so counter-intuitive.
