The best paper airplane in the world | Hacker News Reader

The best paper airplane in the world

zurqui.com

104 pointswallflower30 comments

I would have won a paper airplane contest in elementary school if the teacher hadn't been lame about it. The rules were to build a paper airplane with paper clips, paper and tape. Clearly, most of the kids were going to build silly airplanes that barely flew, with the best sticking to more or less standard designs that still wouldn't go all that far. My design was very simple: wad a lot of paperclips up into a compact ball and wrap it with paper and tape. I knew I could hurl it a lot farther than even the viable plane designs would go, because I could sink way more energy into propelling it. It was clearly superior, so the teacher disallowed it:-/

It seems thinking outside the box isn't encouraged in schools. Is this because schools (especially schools for children) are more about socialization than they are for learning?

Step back a moment and ask yourself if the anecdote is really a case of a student not playing by implied rules. The teacher most likely had an idea of what they wanted to see students do but failed to make it clear. This was effectively a competition and, as is usual with competition, it's nice to have all competitors on the same ground.

Both sides have a point. I think a good teacher would have indeed separated this unusual entry from the main competition, because the other kids would have reasonably felt cheated by competing against something that's more a ball than an airplane. On the other hand, it's a clever hack, and deserves some acknowledgement. The appropriate acknowledgement depends on the kid; I know that if I did something like that, I'd probably either have some mischief up my sleeve or just want to disengage from the task as quickly as possible. The best way to have dealt with me, then, would be to acknowledge that I've got a clever trick, but that with all my spare time I should really construct something that has wings and flies, in the (implicit) spirit of the event.

It seems that when you're asked for a plane, you're expected to create a plane, not a wad of paper.

Presumably, this was during a unit on areodynamics, and the idea was to demonstrate an understanding of areodynamics, and not to show that you can throw balls farther than you can throw planes.

If the teacher had asked for the object that would go farthest, instead of specifically asking for a paper plane, then you would have a point.

1. There were no rules on what the 'plane' was supposed to look like. Creativity was encouraged and normally rewarded in this class (I liked the teacher a lot, actually, and was irked also because it was out of character for her to forbid thinking outside the box).

2. It wasn't during a unit on aerodynamics, and in any case, "the motion of air, particularly when it interacts with a moving object" is quite relevant to wads of paper, meteorites, missiles, arrows, helicopters, and various other objects that are not airplanes. It might have been a good opportunity to explore why something like my wad of paper would go farther than most planes, as well as the relative real world advantages of different things.

I have a similar anecdote from a summer camp as a kid. We were asked to build a tower from various materials. Points were given for the height of the tower, and subtracted for arbitrary "costs" of different materials (eg. a role of tape may cost 100 points).

I immediately realized that the costs worked in such a way that it was infeasible to build anything and come out positive, so I convinced my team to not build anything while we watched other teams go into the negative, while we calculating their debts.

It worked great until the teacher caught on and adjusted the prices so that it was cost-effective to build.

I had a similar contest in school where I used a trick that I had learned just by goofing around with paper planes as a kid...

You take the classic paper airplane fold and simply do a double inner fold... so crease in 2x before building the wings. You basically end up with a dart that can easily fly across a gymnasium and farther depending on how hard it's hurled.

I remember some kid using that design and flying it pretty far, but my darts (er, planes) were hitting high on the back wall of the gym with plenty of distance to go.

That style of plane is best for speed and accuracy. A plane built to glide will travel farther. I used to invent paper airplanes as a kid, and I found that ones beginning with the cross-folds (more likely to balance) and broad wings yielded the best results.

Maybe the dart style planes can handle a bit more thrust?

Sounds like the teacher should have set a limit on the number of paperclips, the amount of tape, and the size of the paper. In real life, there's no such thing as an infinite resource. :)

That said, I'm just being silly. It's school. All of its rules are arbitrary.

Cool, but the rules were broken. I could add this missing rule: the plan should be able to go forward for at least one meter even if no force is applied to it but just released from an height of 2 meters. Well the two costants may need some tuning.

The reason this flies well is that it is a proper airplane. Most paper airplane designs I have seen don't have a horizontal stabilizer, which will usually doom the plane to crash.

Without a tail section, most airplanes are unstable in the pitch plane - the resultant force from the aerodynamic lift doesn't work from the same point on the wing as the center of gravity. An additional horizontal lift surface is required to make sure the plane doesn't pitch up and stall.

The point the author makes about the center of gravity is good - with the center of gravity far forward, the airplane will have a smaller angle of attack (and hence less lift) for any given airspeed, and hence the plane will end up in stable flight at a higher speed, with a resulting higher margin for how strong gusts are required for it to stall and crash.

This is pretty basic applied aerodynamics, but not very common knowledge among the kindergarten teachers who teach the art of making paper airplanes.

This thing might fly if you remove the tail, because the center of gravity is far below the resultant lift center - there is some trick here that can allow you to get by without a horizontal stabilizer. Paragliders and hang gliders use this, but I don't know why it works. Actually, the instructions on this site are pretty neat and probably a good way to learn about practical aerodynamics. On the "how to fly" page, they explain how you can trim the plane for higher or lower speeds by adjusting the tail section and making "flaps" - changing the shape of the wing in order to alter the lift coefficient (how much lift you get at a given airspeed and angle of attack)

If Japan can pull off this paper airplane that's launched from the International Space Station and returns to Earth (reaching speeds of Mach 20), then I'd have to vote for that:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7230949.stm

I'm pretty skeptical of the heat resistant coating mentioned in the article...

Ok, I just made it. It takes about 30 minutes to put together. The instructions are easy to follow but halfway through I changed to watching the video. Which is linked to in the instructions.

Mine fly's really well, it has a lot of lift so it could almost use some more weight in the tail section.

I added some tape to the tail section to hopefully add some weight. It didn't really help and thus my reaction is to say it isn't the "best" paper airplane. I don't think there is any "Best" paper airplane.

Try tweaking down the trailing edge of the wing and/or the trailing horizontal edge of the tail, to counter it. Mine was diving, and tweaking these surfaces upwards made a dramatic difference.

He talks about this after the instructions: http://www.zurqui.com/crinfocus/paper/air-fly.html

Mine flew surprisingly well. Took around 20mins to build and I've just lobbed it out of my balcony on the 30th floor lol. It was too dark outside to follow but will try again in the daytime :D

Add light. Or use glow-in-the-dark paper.

would have come in handy at the GT vs LSU chick-fil-a bowl where disheartened Georgia Tech fans were bored and made paper airplanes out of BB&T fliers on every seat.

"The second half so lacked in drama that fans began throwing dozens of paper airplanes from the second and third decks, cheering when a plane reached the field." - AJC.com

"24. Carefully tear off strip of paper. Save the strip of paper because you are going to need it to make the tail."

In my opinion, a proper paper airplane is made from a single, uncut paper. If you break that page into pieces, you might as well be using multiple pieces of paper.

Mine too. You take a single sheet and fold it. No tape. No paperclips.

So it's only an improper plane..

That was enjoyable. Thanks for the link.

For some reason, I sometimes find myself somewhere with free time and sheets of paper, but can never make a good airplane. That is no longer going to be a problem :)

Mine took like 10 min to make. Flies forward and upward almost for 5-8 meters(indoors) and takes a rebound and lands. It is quite a sight and worth the time !

The heavy head and longish tail are key to this plane which distinguishes from most common ones. In my case, I guess the not so perfect tail and slightly tilted wings made it rebound.

PS: I checked this post and did not have the time or excitement to make one right then. But I have to tell you, you better pick a rectangular sheet of paper right away and try this one. Mindblowing.

The best glider I've seen -- supposedly designed by a NASA engineer, although I have nothing to back that up -- is also one of the simplest.

Fold an edge over itself a couple of times, about a cm or two, to create a weighted edge. Then crease the entire sheet at regular intervals perpendicular to this edge, so it forms a curved surface. That's it!

ooh a flying wing ! i have tried this a number of times myself, and it works great indoors. however at the two extremities, i generally fold into a canard like thingie... works fine.

I remember this design from my childhood. (Well, a variation of it). Dropping the tail and tearing elevators/ailerons into the back of it turns it into an awesome stunt plane, one that can do loops and so on beautifully, or can (if thrown right) come back to you like a boomerang.

Me too - I've been making that variation since I was a kid and now my kids love playing with them too. I'm going to try this tail version now to see how they compare.

I will have to try this out when I get home.

I still think I would prefer the Nakamura Lock, though, because it accomplishes a similar goal (steady flight due to a proper center of gravity) with less complexity: http://www.exploratorium.edu/exploring/paper/airplanes.html

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