Learn How to Fold a World-Record-Setting Paper Airplane

[hashkb]

When I was a kid, the record we cared about was flight time, not distance. We'd build planes that would gently circle and throw them straight up in the air. Distance seems to have more to do with the arm, to me.

[glaberficken]

I grew up in an 10 floor apartment building and I would just fold a few planes and throw them out the window. Now the interesting thing about a street with tall buildings is that on some perfect days the breeze forms these smooth updrafts along the building walls.

My goal was get the paper plane to catch the updrafts and actually climb up from my 3rd floor to the top of the building. It was very rare, I must have tried 10s of different fold types but sometimes conditions would be just perfect and a particular plane would ride up in circles sometimes even clearing the top floor of the building and then glide down and land sometimes hundreds of meters away or even vanish from view.

When I ran out of planes I would grab my bicycle and go out to recover as many of them possible, come back up and repeat...

...sweet times =)

[blktiger]

John Collins makes more than just distance paper airplanes. He has a nice TED talk about paper airplanes that I found interesting. (Not sure what I think about his opinion of Bernoulli's law though.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n4xq0DnbHI

[JKCalhoun]

You reminded me of "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (http://a.co/aCbN01n) .. what a classic.

There is a section in the book on the plane that won the duration contest. More or less a rectangular wing as I recall with just enough forward mass to give it forward movement and just enough dihedral to keep it stable.

Edit: found a page where the first image is of that record setting duration flight: http://www.codex99.com/design/the-paper-airplane-book.html

[yorby]

2 different categories, that's all... they both could not compete with each other (more then likely).

[swiley]

100% agree with this! Flight time is way more fun than distance.

[truculation]

Has the solution been found?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKeQgjJYq9s

[matthewmcg]

If you liked paper airplanes as a kid and you're curious about the current state of the art for hand thrown aircraft, check out "discus launch" gliders (DLGs). These are radio-controlled models with a 1 or 1.5 meter wing span that are designed to be strong enough to be hand launched to almost 200ft but light and aerodynamic enough that they can be held aloft for a very long time by thermals.

There are some interesting design choices that have to be made between optimizing for maximum launch height and maximum glide performance.

Here's a video showing a recent model available in kit form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD0VXi_DBMM

[pmcollins]

Here's the page if you want to buy the one in the video or learn more about its structure http://f3j.in.ua/snipe-2.html

Get a load of those prices. :-)

Also, I love how the minimalism even extends to the domain name.

[callesgg]

Wow what an awsome dude.

I wounder if he has some sort of media training.

[justusthane]

...

"Collins, a former television producer and director, left his TV career behind three years ago in order to focus full-time on using his planes to educate audiences."

[swyx]

My dad was an aircraft engineer. When I was in 5th grade I won a paper plane contest for making a plane that flew out and came back to me (like he did in that video). That was just about the peak of my scientific achievements ‍️

[yial]

If you find this stuff cool, you might also enjoy “penny plane “

(Search for penny plane plans )