Paper Airplane Designs (2013)
foldnfly.com
foldnfly.com
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.
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.
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.
That isn't at all blurry.
It was probably the combination of available letter-sized sheets of paper (old homework) and some free time (recess and/ study hall).
Microsoft Publisher 97 had (and still has in the 365 version) templates for different papercraft, including a couple of paper airplane designs. I honed my standard paper airplane design on this, and likely wasted gallons of ink in the process. Living in an apartment with a balcony also upped the incentive to make paper airplanes.
It also looks almost exactly like one in the cover of the paper airplane book:
Klutz Book of Paper Airplanes Craft Kit https://a.co/94zUS0G
Turns out Klutz might’ve printed quite a few paper airplane instruction manuals.
The circle was located a few inches above the exact center of the paper.
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.
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.
It really sailed, maybe went twice as far as the second best plane: my plane.
But their plane was disqualified on the grounds that it wasn't a plane. So, I was deemed winner.
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.
I still like paper airplanes, though.
Since there was no rule against it, we've allowed it. Some of the teams who played with conventional airplanes got furious. (These were all adult people!) Although innitially looking fairly innocent, I believe it ended up as the second most controversial activity we've held.
Played outdoor, between two teams who face each other on the opposite sides of a small playing field. In the middle there is a stick stuck into the ground.
The players are assigned various numbers. In each round a moderator announces a predicate such as "even numbers" or "factors of three primes" or "sum of digits is a power of two" etc.
The players who satisfy the predicate are allowed onto the field and their goal is to get the stick and bring it to their side. If a player mistakenly steps into the field they are out of the game. Grabbing and pulling other players while battling for the stick is fine.
The last time this was played it rained a bit and the terrain was muddy and slippery and also the game was probably needlessly violent. Too many people didn't enjoy it and we've decided to retire it.
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While I'm at it, the third most controversial game was a game where teams had to complete various tasks in and around the village after the sunset, find some objects, etc. We always have at least one such game and it is usually one of a kind, played just that one time.
This time there was a special twist. Unknown to the rest of the players, each team had a traitor whose goal was to hinder the progress of their team as much as possible. The traitor whose team finished in the last place was the actual winner of the game.
The activity was not scored, but the players were led to believe it is going to be scored.
When we played it some teams had conflicts and it sowed a lot of distrust and paranoia that spilled into the next day's games as well. Also the players who gave the game a lot of effort were angry that it is not scored in the end. It was the opposite of a team building activity so we never explored it further.
Although I have to say, I'm still intrigued by the concept and would like to try it in some other form one day again.
- https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galacti...
- https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9220/saboteur
There are also some D&D campaigns that work in the same way (and unlike in the board games the heroes don't know that there might be traitors among them).
The analogy would be appropriate if BSG was a competitive space fleet management game and some players decide in advance to make it a meta-game to join and sabotage each fleet without telling anyone of their intentions, leaving everyone else playing the ”fake” game while they at the end reveal the ”real” game and that whoever lost the real game actually won and vice versa.
I think the major issue that sets the game apart from the mentioned board games is that players don't know there might be traitors. OTOH it's impossible to have the board game that way, since it would only work the first time it is played. However, the D&D campaigns are the same as our game in this regard.
Anyway, the game wasn't all bad, some teams told us that they had a great time and found it an interesting and uncommon experience. But since too many people struggled with it we've decided to not run it again.
The most efficient way to move a stack of paper to a goal isn't to take each piece and do something to it (crumple/fold) but to just leave it together and heave the entire ream of paper.
Note: this also frustrates the folks putting on the activity.
The inventor, when it was a new things years ago, submitted it to a Paper Airplane contest. The contests disqualified him because it was not an "Airplane".
He argued A) It s made of paper (Cardboard from a Pizza Box), B) it flew (for very long distances), therefore it is a Paper Airplane. QED
From experience I can tell you that A) They are attracted to trees, B) They swim like bricks (lost my first one in the first half hour to the local creek), C) They are very sensitive to thermal gradients. You can watch it ride up and over the finger tips of whomever you are playing with so it is just out of their reach. D) You need football size field, at a minimum, to paly with these.
that really sounds like the kind of thing a person might get stuck with through out their days in school. did this stick around for awhile, or was it mercifully a short lived thing?
A few teases in the first week maybe, overall quite merciful.
On the surface, this sounds like a fabulous exercise: it requires some creative engineering thinking. But apparently, the way they addressed the winners left both of the top two teams feeling unsatisfied. Great exercise; poor execution.
He'll never have my blue ribbon, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BNg4fDJC8A
Out of all paper planes I tried, it has the best flying capabilities by far.
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.
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.
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.
The only source I can find is a Reddit comment stating that the design is named after Nakamura for having invented the type of fold that holds the plane together (https://redd.it/j2yjsd)
The first fold is at 22.5 degrees, which makes all further folds have alignment with the base of the plane.
My entire life i was folding a plane that starts with two classic 45 degrees, then a 90 degree fold of the top 2/5th of the paper, again 45 degrees tip, hook in the little triangle. Fold over symmetry line and add wings however you want them. It's quite similar with hooking in the tip (the 04:18 crease), but not nearly as elegant to fold. It is capable of doing a looping, and is otherwise a decent flyer.
Curious about yours though, can't try it out here as I'm in the office.
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).
It's literally two hoops of paper and a stick. Here's a page I found with the design.
https://www.exploratorium.edu/science_explorer/hoopster.html
You throw them fast and underhanded imparting a bit of spin — they'll sail across a gymnasium.
However, I see that it doesn't have the plane which I usually made as a child.
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).
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.
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.
I'm terrible at Biology, so I choose the latter option. I found I liked CS, and now here I am :)
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.
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.
I sometimes have those what if moments.
It's like the great American poet Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, except I took the well travelled road.
Doesn't go fast, but it hovers in the air for quite a bit.
Does this until it hits the ground: Go down, gather lift and go up, reach stall speed, stall, repeat.
Nice to watch if you have a tiny one that you launch from a great height.
But even if I get one, general aviation isn't really a thing here in India so it's kind of a dead-end.
I think USA is a better place for these kinds of activities, where the plane scene is much more active.
It's funny, it's kind of similar to walkie talkie transmissions in the summer. They can get tunneled through the troposphere and suddenly you are talking to people you never expected to contact.
A couple summers ago I was out in my yard, called out randomly on my little 5W handheld, and the signal went just over 8 miles through flat, forested city neighborhoods into the back end of a guy's directional antenna on his house. We had a good laugh at that. I've run tests in the neighborhood and I'm usually lucky to get out a single mile.
During the same season I also like that I can pick up Indian music from an FM radio station 150+ miles south of me (KSJO), using a small pocket radio. Searching around for those signals is also kind of like fishing.
Anyway. I think it's pretty neat how different seasonal conditions change the dynamics of a hobby interest or a science.
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?
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.
Flying rings are interesting, too. The rotationally symmetrical type formed from only a roll fold and tape (purity notwithstanding) are similarly minimalistic
[1] like this without the winglets, thus a case against my theory of wing support: https://www.origamiway.com/plane-spy-plane.shtml
Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466325 - Dec 2021 (8 comments)
Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23545860 - June 2020 (8 comments)
Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755 - Oct 2018 (206 comments)
Real Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12632253 - Oct 2016 (1 comment)
Which makes me to wonder what is the logic for checking a duplicate? I know that dups are checked while submitting a link, but how far in time does it go?
If the check is time bound is it due to performance or is it due to belief that after sufficient time gap content inside an identical link could be different?
This thread gives some idea about the complexity, but still I'm none the wiser.
When I post "related" links like in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135274, the purpose is simply to point readers to other discussions they may find interesting. It's not meant to imply "these are dupes that shouldn't have been reposted". I hope that's clear!
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)
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
In addition to being able to glide very far, you could launch it with a meter stick.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671555510
They are a bit finicky to make, but fly very nicely. One day a friend and I were messing around and added a dumb amount of weight to the front of one. Think it was a clip his mom used to dry cloths outside. Nearly doubled the weight and put the center of balance way near the front of the plane. We expected a nosedive. Gave it a toss and it 3x'd the flight length easily. It was already fairly decent and you could easily get across a room with little changes. Now it was easily getting across his yard.
Just for info: these use the "Letter paper", not A4, as I remember. But most designs should work anyway.
"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)."
http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/More/Misc/How_To_Ma...
https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00jerr
I went through 2 physical copies cutting out all the patterns to make the various planes.
Happy to answer any questions.