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Comment by iaw | Hacker News Reader

Similar story from a university aero course that ended with a paper airplane competition.

There were some remarkable paper airplanes, making amazing flights, all sorts of research and time went into developing the ideal model.

One guy comes up representing his team and he gets out a piece of rolling paper and a lighter. Tears the tiniest portion off the rolling paper, sets it alight, and then follows it with his finger through the air as it took forever to land on the ground.

I believe the incident led to a rule change for later years.

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> follows it with his finger through the air as it took forever to land on the ground.

Sounds interesting, but I'm confused. So is he walking in front of it, and the flame is pulled toward his finger? Did it travel the farthest that way?

No, apologies. He burnt the paper and then picked one of the ashes as his "plane"

His finger never touched the plane after it took "flight" just pointed to it from the side so that everyone could follow the "flight path."

Some classmates were upset, I was just impressed.

Ah, I'm guessing time aloft was the metric?

"Time of flight" only the definition of flight was something like unpowered and untethered off the ground. So floating slowly to the ground becomes "flight" by the definition of the rules.

Wouldn't the burning of the paper technically make it powered?

No, the burning of the paper removed a great of mass from the paper turning to to a brittle paper ash. After the fire was out is when the timer started, since the paper ash was so much lighter but the same volume its buoyancy in air was drastically increased causing it to "float."

The up draft from the flame wasn't utilized to power the flight, the fire was only used transform the original rolling paper into a "plane" by mass reduction through combustion.

You can use a light paper and a board that you walk with to provide lift; I'd have thought that would create a "thrower stays behind line" rule.

There was a team that did this, as long as they didn't create an up draft it was legal by the rules, their air time was still less than a minute.

The burnt ash wafted for well over 60 seconds.

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