Sentence:  Housing a Dirigible [...] When the ship is kept head on to the wind, it is easy enough to guide her, but when a wind blows across the mouth of the shed, every man's heart is in its throat. The ship offers so much more surface sidewise than endwise that she becomes an enormous <WSD>kite</WSD>. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A lightweight toy or other device, traditionally flat and shaped like a triangle with a segment of a circle attached to its base or like a quadrilateral "(see sense 9)", carried on the wind and tethered and controlled from the ground by one or more lines.