My interest in science started when a friend and I folded a few paper planes, tested them over a small downhill section outside my house, made notes about what worked, tweaked and experimented with new designs, and so on. It blew my little mind that with structured experimentation you could design things that actually got better with each generation. Where would the improvements stop?<p>With hindsight, I realise that most of the improvements we measured were really just statistical noise. We never had a control plane, so if one by accident flew better one test, then we would tweak something and then we would naturally see regression to the mean, but we would record that as a tweak that made things worse.<p>To little me it was a lesson in deliberate design. To grown-up me I guess it's a lesson in how easy it is to delude yourself without proper experiment design and statistics.<p>Anyway, then after seeing my interest my father brought me an early Windows program that contained animated instructions on some paper plane designs. One of them was vastly superior to anything I had ever seen. But with the years, I forgot how to fold it. I had been looking for it for over 20 years when a few months ago, I wanted to show my son (of two years) a good paper plane and guess what? I think I've found the design! But it took a blurry YouTube video and some trial and error. I ought to write it down some day.
In fourth grade we had a paper airplane contest, but they had a restriction on the design: a circle about the size of a quarter was on the page, and no fold or crease could go through the circle.<p>The circle was located a few inches above the exact center of the paper.<p>Anyway I made a "dart", and just offset the angle a little to avoid the circle. It was good, and most of the competition was incredibly bad. And a few maybe had a bad launch. One throw only.<p>One clever design was submitted by a duo composed of my two worst nine year old enemies: Derek and Derek's sidekick. It was basically a UFO (saucer) made by carefully crumpling the edge until it was a nice size to throw. They threw it sidearm with one finger hooked around the rim.<p>It really sailed, maybe went twice as far as the second best plane: my plane.<p>But their plane was disqualified on the grounds that it wasn't a plane. So, I was deemed winner.<p>For the announcements the next morning, my name was announced as the wrong-gendered version (something like Jesse announced as Jessica) and it definitely didn't feel like a win anymore.<p>I still like paper airplanes, though.
My favorite paper plane is the one that is explained starting at 03:00 here:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BNg4fDJC8A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BNg4fDJC8A</a><p>Out of all paper planes I tried, it has the best flying capabilities by far.<p>Form and function really come together in this one. It looks beautifully simple and elegant. And that's also how it flies. When you throw it from a rooftop, you are in for quite a show. It often flies loooong smooth circles. If you are lucky with the wind, it can stay in the air quite a while.<p>I do not use A4 paper though. I prefer A5, which is half the size of A4. I usually tear an A4 into two equal halves and use one of them.<p>I also do not do the crease at 04:18. Without it, the paper plane is even more beautiful, because you can put it on a flat surface and it stands on its own.
As a kid I had a great book with lots of science experiments in it called "Science Is" (Author: Susan V. Bosak)<p>It had an entire section on airplanes but there was one that absolutely destroyed my intuition about flight and to this day confuses adults whenever I get the chance to make it (something like a team building event where we need to make paper airplanes).<p>It's literally two hoops of paper and a stick. Here's a page I found with the design.<p><a href="https://www.exploratorium.edu/science_explorer/hoopster.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.exploratorium.edu/science_explorer/hoopster.html</a>
Nice.<p>However, I see that it doesn't have the plane which I usually made as a child.<p>As an aside, I was a wannabe pilot who never went to flight school. I love aircrafts, and I love long haul flights (I never got tired from the multiple 15+ hour India<->America flights I took).<p>In India to become a pilot you had to learn math and physics in high-school, and at my highschool, you could either take Math-Physics-Chemistry-Biology, or Math-Physics-Chemistry-ComputerScience.<p>Computer Science (CS) meant they taught you coding, Boolean algebra (incl. Karnaugh Maps), history of CS and the internet, and we eventually moved onto OOP.<p>I'm terrible at Biology, so I choose the latter option. I found I liked CS, and now here I am :)<p>Though I never went to flight school, even today I'm still passionate about it. I follow these youtubers — Mentour Pilot, Captain Joe, Kelsey (74gear), and Dutch Pilot Girl.<p>And I closely follow the aircraft models and the industry in general. I can tell what model an aircraft is just by looking at it.<p>I sometimes have those <i>what if</i> moments.<p>It's like the great American poet Robert Frost's <i>The Road Not Taken</i>, except I took the well travelled road.
One of the finest paper airplanes is the origami design of Prof. James M. Sakoda of Brown University "winner of the origami award in the First Inernational Paper Airplane Contest" in 1967 and published in "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (Jerry Mander, George Dippel, Howard Gossage)<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/Kv94Glf.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/Kv94Glf.png</a>
Given the weather at the moment, I remember, as a kid, being astounded when I threw a paper airplane on a hot summers-day that didn't immediately come back down to earth like normal, but soared and soared and soared for minutes before I lost it. It blew my little kid mind.
My friends and I could never get any of the pointy darts to work with a hard throw--they never had the right balance not to loop or nosedive at high speed. What we settled on as the most satisfying to hurl is this design (found online widely under this name; requires letter proportion paper): <a href="https://www.instructables.com/The-Hammer-Paper-Airplane/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instructables.com/The-Hammer-Paper-Airplane/</a><p>Carefully made, it flies straight when yeeted without trimming, and the blunt nose handles landings without damage. I surmise that the fold along the entire edge of the wing contributes to high-speed performance by preventing the trailing edge from fluttering. Could this also be why the world record designs tend to have winglets?<p>A design that's amusing to experiment with is the most minimalistic glider, made with a heavy roll-fold of the leading edge of the paper and three parallel folds forming the wings and fuselage.[1] The parameters being length & number of folds and camber of the wings, it can be tuned to manage a hard throw straight before stalling and leveling out to a long flight in phugoid motion.<p>Flying rings are interesting, too. The rotationally symmetrical type formed from only a roll fold and tape (purity notwithstanding) are similarly minimalistic<p>[1] like this without the winglets, thus a case against my theory of wing support: <a href="https://www.origamiway.com/plane-spy-plane.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.origamiway.com/plane-spy-plane.shtml</a>
My father was a high school math teacher and he would borrow books on paper plane folding at the library, then photocopy the books with the photocopier at his school<p>We spent a lot of weekends folding planes together - I think we both liked the repetitive nature of it. It's definitely one of the things that got me hooked on engineering as a child (alongside Legos)<p>He died of an anyorism when I was 11 and I haven't folded a paper plane ever since - maybe it's time I give it a go
I used to love making the ring wing glider: <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider...</a><p>In addition to being able to glide very far, you could launch it with a meter stick.
If you uncheck <i>all</i> boxes, except "easy", then you get this plane recommendation [0] which is note listed on the landing page by default. Easy, but with 100+ folds.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.foldnfly.com/404.html#The-Goof-Up" rel="nofollow">https://www.foldnfly.com/404.html#The-Goof-Up</a>
While they'r not in the foldable category, the paper plane designs of Yasuaki Ninomiya are pretty incredible, though apparently no longer produced commercially.<p><a href="https://bluegrassroots.ninja/whitewings" rel="nofollow">https://bluegrassroots.ninja/whitewings</a>
Very cool.<p>Just for info: these use the "Letter paper", not A4, as I remember. But most designs should work anyway.<p>"The most used of this series is the size A4, which is 210 mm × 297 mm (8.27 in × 11.7 in) and thus almost exactly 1⁄16 square metre (0.0625 m2; 96.8752 sq in) in area. For comparison, the letter paper size commonly used in North America (8+1⁄2 in × 11 in, 216 mm × 279 mm) is about 6 mm (0.24 in) wider and 18 mm (0.71 in) shorter than A4. Then, the size of A5 paper is half of A4, as 148 mm × 210 mm (5.8 in × 8.3 in)."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216</a>
Is there a good biodegradable paper for making planes? There are lots of great buildings/bridges/mountains/cliffs that would be really fun to launch them off of.
It might be fun to implement these in something like this origami simulator: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31281700" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31281700</a> <a href="https://origamisimulator.org" rel="nofollow">https://origamisimulator.org</a> ; that seems to have a bit of trouble with order-of-operation steps, but I think would still be interesting.
I really like the 'Fun Flyer', never knew it had a name. Although I like to do a variation where I fold the wing tips to create a kind of 'winglet'. And sometimes cut 'flaps' on the back of the wing to adjust the flight path. So the wings may end up looking like the 'king bee'
In my childhood, our reference for paper planes was Capt. Barnaby's classic:<p><a href="http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/More/Misc/How_To_Make_&_Fly_Paper_Airplanes.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/More/Misc/How_To_Ma...</a>
I've noticed that in N. America "The Dart" is the standard and in S.E. Asia kids fold something that's like a hybrid between "The Dart" and "The Buzz" that flies really well. I've never had much luck with the dart, it's usually really unstable.
Has anyone done any research on which type of paper travels best? How does weight distribution play a factor? Does the type of paper impact the design of the plane you build?
Nice. Can't wait to try out some of thee with my 11-year old.
At one point of time we used to be obsessed with paper planes ... and that's when we only knew 2-3 designs.