
Learn How to Fold a World-Record-Setting Paper Airplane - the_duck
https://www.wired.com/story/learn-how-to-fold-a-world-record-setting-paper-airplane/
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hashkb
When I was a kid, the record we cared about was flight time, not distance.
We'd build planes that would gently circle and throw them straight up in the
air. Distance seems to have more to do with the arm, to me.

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glaberficken
I grew up in an 10 floor apartment building and I would just fold a few planes
and throw them out the window. Now the interesting thing about a street with
tall buildings is that on some perfect days the breeze forms these smooth
updrafts along the building walls.

My goal was get the paper plane to catch the updrafts and actually climb up
from my 3rd floor to the top of the building. It was very rare, I must have
tried 10s of different fold types but sometimes conditions would be just
perfect and a particular plane would ride up in circles sometimes even
clearing the top floor of the building and then glide down and land sometimes
hundreds of meters away or even vanish from view.

When I ran out of planes I would grab my bicycle and go out to recover as many
of them possible, come back up and repeat...

...sweet times =)

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matthewmcg
If you liked paper airplanes as a kid and you're curious about the current
state of the art for hand thrown aircraft, check out "discus launch" gliders
(DLGs). These are radio-controlled models with a 1 or 1.5 meter wing span that
are designed to be strong enough to be hand launched to almost 200ft but light
and aerodynamic enough that they can be held aloft for a very long time by
thermals.

There are some interesting design choices that have to be made between
optimizing for maximum launch height and maximum glide performance.

Here's a video showing a recent model available in kit form:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD0VXi_DBMM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD0VXi_DBMM)

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pmcollins
Here's the page if you want to buy the one in the video or learn more about
its structure [http://f3j.in.ua/snipe-2.html](http://f3j.in.ua/snipe-2.html)

Get a load of those prices. :-)

Also, I love how the minimalism even extends to the domain name.

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matthewmcg
Yep, hand-made carbon fiber parts for niche applications are unavoidably
expensive. Flying one of these things is like tossing a decent spec Macbook
into the air and hoping you don't get it stuck in a tree.

F3K and F3J refer to numbered sections within the competition rules[1] set by
the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI). FAI is the Geneva-based
organization that tracks most "official" flight records for all kinds of
aircraft. F3K is the hand-launched glider class and F3J is the thermal
duration soaring class.

[1]
[https://www.fai.org/sites/default/files/documents/sc4_vol_f3...](https://www.fai.org/sites/default/files/documents/sc4_vol_f3_soaring_18.pdf)

The community has adopted these designations as a shorthand for the aircraft
types, sort of like how in the U.S. people refer "401(k) accounts" or
"501(c)(3) organizations."

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callesgg
Wow what an awsome dude.

I wounder if he has some sort of media training.

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justusthane
...

"Collins, a former television producer and director, left his TV career behind
three years ago in order to focus full-time on using his planes to educate
audiences."

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swyx
My dad was an aircraft engineer. When I was in 5th grade I won a paper plane
contest for making a plane that flew out and came back to me (like he did in
that video). That was just about the peak of my scientific achievements ‍️

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yial
If you find this stuff cool, you might also enjoy “penny plane “

(Search for penny plane plans )

