Paper Airplane Designs

Seeing some of these designs brought back memories.

My best friend growing up had this huge vaulted-ceiling living room with a balcony above it. Perfect for conducting test flights of different paper airplane designs. I had a book of paper airplane models we used and improvised from to try for the longest flight time. He had a mom who worked for the phone company, and brought home reams of green bar paper reports. [0] Those pages were larger than typical US Letter, but about the same proportions.

Once we got bored of using the green bar, we moved on to newspapers. It was harder to make the airframes rigid, but when we managed it we got some crazy long flight times. One of them just happened to have a flight radius that matched the room and took forever to slowly float down to the ground.

Bookmarked. This is a cool site.

[0] (Example) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F5SC3ME

I didn't see it on the page, but I've had great fun with the "Suzanne" by John Collins (ThePaperAirplaneGuy on YouTube) which broke the world record for distance in 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDiC9iMcWTc

Easy enough that I can fold it from memory and my kid can even do pretty well at it. I feel like it's a good one for a party trick.

Lots of sites have instructions for it.

The ones we made as a kid resembled 'the buzz', but they do it differently and IMO incorrectly. It's the same up until about step 4, the folds should come in at an angle, then your just bend the tip of the initial triangle fold up. Seals in the wings and gives you a nice little handle.

It's not shown by default, but I really enjoyed the whimsicalness of "The Goofup" https://www.foldnfly.com/404.html#The-Goof-Up

From what, 8 years ago?

(2013) please.

Some previous discussion from 3 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755

Obligatory add-on :^)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/264927357415