Very cool. I always upvote anything about paper airplanes, ha ha.
Many, many hours of my youth were spent making paper airplanes and flying them. I also enjoyed modifying designs with my own embellishments to see if my changes were improvements or no.
Perhaps after catching "The Birdmen" (1971) on TV I became obsessed with building catapult-like paper airplane launchers using thread, paper clips and weights to drag the airplanes along the length of the kitchen table and send them sailing off the end.
I think part of this was due to a lack of toys to entertain myself with (my sister and I, growing up with a single mother who worked as a secretary — she stole office products so that I was kept in letter-size paper, pencils, pens). Perhaps too there were a lot of those months spent indoors in the either too-cold or too-hot/humid Midwest.
I had a book around the turn of the century with paper airplane folding instructions. Lazily, I stuck to the simple ones and my favourite was called "Phoenix". Could not find it on this page but searching for the book I found a video where the author demonstrates: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2V55rc58cDg
My cousin and I were particularly destructive children and used to build paper airplanes and fly them up into the ceiling fan. Sometimes they'd get caught on a blade and come flying off. Was playing a lot of Starfox 64 at the time, so we imagined we were attacking a boss. We'd try and see how many attacks we could get in before our plane was completely mangled and wouldn't fly anymore. Good times.
Another destructive game we used to play was lighting army men on fire and fusing their melted plastic bodies together to create a zombie army of plastic amalgamations. Half-green, half-tan grenadiers with bazookas for a heads, etc. God bless America!
Hah, I flew planes into ceiling fans too! I also remember scraping my planes against the floor until holes wore into the paper, and seeing how well they could continue flying. There was something really cool about seeing a plane with so much accumulated damage still able to fly.
I like the implication that there was a goof on someone’s part.
I get a lot of “yeah but what if they do something like search for things that don’t exist” (or similar situations) and some weird ideas follow about how they user gets confused and the software is supposed to solve all “user behaves illogically” problems and we get some really strange solutions that makes the software even more unpredictable.
Like no man, search for nothing is “yo you goofed and searched for nothing”.
I wonder if they've tested that one against conventional designs. Depending on how well you compress the ball, it might well be very competitive for distance.
The simple flight path in the video does not relly do it justice. When you throw it outside, it will have a beautiful loooong curved flight. When there is some wind, it often goes to explore the sky for quite a while before it comes back down again.
If anybody knows a design that can compete with this one, I would be very interested to try it!
(disclaimer: not an aeronautic engineer) when you double an object, its weight increases by 8x (all three dimensions increase by 2x) but the wing area surface only becomes 4x larger. You thus end up with a worse lift-to-weight ratio.
In addition, the purpose of a regular plane is to transport goods and people while the purpose of a paper plane is to just float. The closest full scale objects to a paper plane would be gliders, which do ressemble paper-planes to some extent.
you get some really good distance if you throw it like a (american) football, managed to clear a couple city blocks once, thrown on a hot dry day from a high floor at school...
Because I am unsafe, I started making them from aluminum cans with the top/bottom cut off. Some strips of duct tape along one of the edges balances it (and so defines your leading edge).
The right wrist action was needed but you could send them sailing across an auditorium to clatter against the far wall.
There's 48 designs, so this isn't much of a database, more like a short list. For something completely different, my favorite collection of paper planes are those by Jayson Merrill: https://www.youtube.com/@jayson5674 They're the most complex planes I've seen under the restrictions of no cuts and no adhesive. Here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-n6NAbJduk
The fact we have YouTube channels for people making paper airplanes, eating MREs and reviewing junk MP3 players is what keeps me optimistic of the Internet.
I'm surprised they don't have the "lock fold" or "Nakamura Lock" design. When I was younger, that was the most consistent design for a good plane. Not always the best, but never the worst. Somebody talented could fold up a dart to beat it on distance, or a glider to stay up longer, but everybody could make a decent "lock fold".
This is the exact same design I used in middle school to win a paper airplane competition! It is called "The Moth" on the website I found it on back in the day: https://www.10paperairplanes.com/how-to-make-paper-airplanes.... I still remember how to make it to this day.
That's not even the kind of lock I expected. It's possible to design a plane so once the wings are folded down, the fuselage is locked in a tightly folded position. I don't have a good online reference at the moment...
I agree. I didn't know it had a name. Thanks for it.
Also plus points. 1) It was easy to remember how to fold it. 2) It had good structural resistance and could withstand several flights and bumps. 3) It provided the first lesson in aeronautical engineering i.e. you could slightly tilt the one or the other wing in order to make flight behavior corrections.
My real love was one model that I didn't know how to make. An older cousin did. It was a tailed design. Best Flight Ever... See, when you are 5 it is easy to impress!
My Grandfather worked at the Forestry Service and would come home with reams of used type paper (filled with statistics and reports, I assume). My grandparents would put the paper in the toy cabinet for us. I've made thousands of that design of paper airplane and just today learned that it had a name. Thanks!
I spent a very fun holiday break methodically working through these with my nephew and documenting how far we could get them to fly. Big takeaway is that simpler is better and the classics are classic for a reason!
My childhood interest in paper airplanes was completely fuelled by the excellent https://archive.org/details/PAPERAIR , which you can now find on the Internet Archive by the link! The emulation is imperfect, though.
FWIW, the site presents a variation of the origami design of Prof. James M. Sakoda of Brown University "winner of the origami award in the First International Paper Airplane Contest" in 1967 as published in that book.
79 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadI am not even sure how to search for it, even with this database in hands
[1] https://youtu.be/UVUQC_yZe_Y
Search for Walkalong Glider [2] to find what you want.
[1] https://www.foldnfly.com/#/0-1-0-0-1-1-1-1-2
[2] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=walkalong+glide...
Still pretty cool though :-)
Many, many hours of my youth were spent making paper airplanes and flying them. I also enjoyed modifying designs with my own embellishments to see if my changes were improvements or no.
Perhaps after catching "The Birdmen" (1971) on TV I became obsessed with building catapult-like paper airplane launchers using thread, paper clips and weights to drag the airplanes along the length of the kitchen table and send them sailing off the end.
I think part of this was due to a lack of toys to entertain myself with (my sister and I, growing up with a single mother who worked as a secretary — she stole office products so that I was kept in letter-size paper, pencils, pens). Perhaps too there were a lot of those months spent indoors in the either too-cold or too-hot/humid Midwest.
The Great International Paper Airplane Book
https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00mandrich
- 1oz Amaro Nonino
- 1oz Aperol
- 1oz bourbon
- 1oz lemon juice
shake with ice, strain to a chilled coupe glass.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671555510
Not as simple as the one in that vid. But a decent selection of them.
https://www.amazon.com/Gliding-Flight-Paper-Make-Original-Ai...
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Another destructive game we used to play was lighting army men on fire and fusing their melted plastic bodies together to create a zombie army of plastic amalgamations. Half-green, half-tan grenadiers with bazookas for a heads, etc. God bless America!
I get a lot of “yeah but what if they do something like search for things that don’t exist” (or similar situations) and some weird ideas follow about how they user gets confused and the software is supposed to solve all “user behaves illogically” problems and we get some really strange solutions that makes the software even more unpredictable.
Like no man, search for nothing is “yo you goofed and searched for nothing”.
/rant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDiC9iMcWTc
The simple flight path in the video does not relly do it justice. When you throw it outside, it will have a beautiful loooong curved flight. When there is some wind, it often goes to explore the sky for quite a while before it comes back down again.
If anybody knows a design that can compete with this one, I would be very interested to try it!
https://www.wired.com/story/learn-how-to-fold-a-world-record...
In addition, the purpose of a regular plane is to transport goods and people while the purpose of a paper plane is to just float. The closest full scale objects to a paper plane would be gliders, which do ressemble paper-planes to some extent.
you get some really good distance if you throw it like a (american) football, managed to clear a couple city blocks once, thrown on a hot dry day from a high floor at school...
Because I am unsafe, I started making them from aluminum cans with the top/bottom cut off. Some strips of duct tape along one of the edges balances it (and so defines your leading edge).
The right wrist action was needed but you could send them sailing across an auditorium to clatter against the far wall.
https://origamimag.com/nakamura-lock-paper-airplane/
That's not even the kind of lock I expected. It's possible to design a plane so once the wings are folded down, the fuselage is locked in a tightly folded position. I don't have a good online reference at the moment...
Also plus points. 1) It was easy to remember how to fold it. 2) It had good structural resistance and could withstand several flights and bumps. 3) It provided the first lesson in aeronautical engineering i.e. you could slightly tilt the one or the other wing in order to make flight behavior corrections.
My real love was one model that I didn't know how to make. An older cousin did. It was a tailed design. Best Flight Ever... See, when you are 5 it is easy to impress!