You could also just do what I did and just fold only the top over itself, and use a bit of the back wing for the winglets, folded out. Tiny, tiny grip, enough to hold, deeper in the back than the front for stability, tiny y in the wings and winglets going out slightly. The wings need to make a y when you drop it in the air (you can simulate this while holding this so you don't mess up your shot at a perfect first flight!). Make sure to fold the front extraordinarily tightly. Otherwise it starts to tank.
Then it's a matter of how hard you launch it. As a child, I was getting shockingly long flight times, and on those special days where there was a breeze...oh boy. What a world.
Super stable, super easy to make, super easy to teach, the hardest part is the arm, the patience to keep trying, the luck that it doesn't catch in a tree, and the patience to adjust the winglets for a nice little spiral.
A lovely part of my engineering days as a child, definitely helped get the creative juices going for this field! I had a white trash bag at one point with all of these novel little designs I came up with just for funsies. :)))) :D :)))) <3
Oh my gosh, no way. You have no idea how much you just made this stranger's day. Thanks so much, dear! <3 :)))) :D :) :) <3
If you have trouble with flight time, you might enjoy having some flaps on the back too. Just ever so slight, almost little bumps that you'd push up subtly with your thumb in the back. If you do it perfectly, it just sails, almost sitting on the air itself. Too strong and it does little swoopy up and downs, too little and it goes straight down.
I'd ask you to send pics of your creation but I guess this is the Hacker News comments section! Super proud of you either way, dear! <3 :)))) :D :)
Well, I just went outside and had a ton of fun for 30 minutes or so with a paper airplane outside of my neighborhood's tennis courts. I forgot how hard elevator tuning was, as well as the apparent unfavorability of the wind sometimes (and how hard it hurts to really chuck something). Super sweaty and happy now, thank you for encouraging _me_ in turn to go out and build a paper airplane for the first time in years. Total blast! Thanks again! <3 :)))) :D :)
I wonder if they've tested that one against conventional designs. Depending on how well you compress the ball, it might well be very competitive for distance.
I like the implication that there was a goof on someone’s part.
I get a lot of “yeah but what if they do something like search for things that don’t exist” (or similar situations) and some weird ideas follow about how they user gets confused and the software is supposed to solve all “user behaves illogically” problems and we get some really strange solutions that makes the software even more unpredictable.
Like no man, search for nothing is “yo you goofed and searched for nothing”.
I'm surprised they don't have the "lock fold" or "Nakamura Lock" design. When I was younger, that was the most consistent design for a good plane. Not always the best, but never the worst. Somebody talented could fold up a dart to beat it on distance, or a glider to stay up longer, but everybody could make a decent "lock fold".
This is the exact same design I used in middle school to win a paper airplane competition! It is called "The Moth" on the website I found it on back in the day: https://www.10paperairplanes.com/how-to-make-paper-airplanes.... I still remember how to make it to this day.
That's not even the kind of lock I expected. It's possible to design a plane so once the wings are folded down, the fuselage is locked in a tightly folded position. I don't have a good online reference at the moment...
I agree. I didn't know it had a name. Thanks for it.
Also plus points. 1) It was easy to remember how to fold it. 2) It had good structural resistance and could withstand several flights and bumps. 3) It provided the first lesson in aeronautical engineering i.e. you could slightly tilt the one or the other wing in order to make flight behavior corrections.
My real love was one model that I didn't know how to make. An older cousin did. It was a tailed design. Best Flight Ever... See, when you are 5 it is easy to impress!
My Grandfather worked at the Forestry Service and would come home with reams of used type paper (filled with statistics and reports, I assume). My grandparents would put the paper in the toy cabinet for us. I've made thousands of that design of paper airplane and just today learned that it had a name. Thanks!
When I was pretty young - maybe six - I spent about a month at a hospital in the USSR. I don’t know why I was there (observation?), and it’s not be point - the point is, while there, slightly older patients taught me how to fold beautiful paper airplanes, with unbelievable aerodynamic properties - I mean those things could fly.
Many years later, I was taking an aerodynamics course at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University taught by Bob Sweginnis (died in plane crash, while practicing aerobatics), who dedicated an entire class to a paper airplane contest. The winning criteria was “plane that stays in the air the longest wins”.
My plane came in second - I designed it to make an easy curve through the bungalow to maximise air time, and Bob Sweginnis did an excellent job launching it. He stopped the timer when my plane hit the wall of the bungalow, with plenty of altitude to spare.
The winner? A sheet of paper, basically, that pendulumed to the green carpet in a swinging motion, like a leaf, about a second slower than it took my Mona Lisa to commit suicide.
That's great! Reminds me of elementary school when I was in "gifted and talented... " program. We did a similar experiment. Each kid had some ornate paper airplane, but my simple design won out.
My dad studied aviation in USSR between 1980-83 while my country was part of USSR. He also had amazing skills in aerodynamics and making paper planes. I guess USSR aviation schools were pretty good that times. Dad's school now http://kkluga.ru/
The simple flight path in the video does not relly do it justice. When you throw it outside, it will have a beautiful loooong curved flight. When there is some wind, it often goes to explore the sky for quite a while before it comes back down again.
If anybody knows a design that can compete with this one, I would be very interested to try it!
Very cool. I always upvote anything about paper airplanes, ha ha.
Many, many hours of my youth were spent making paper airplanes and flying them. I also enjoyed modifying designs with my own embellishments to see if my changes were improvements or no.
Perhaps after catching "The Birdmen" (1971) on TV I became obsessed with building catapult-like paper airplane launchers using thread, paper clips and weights to drag the airplanes along the length of the kitchen table and send them sailing off the end.
I think part of this was due to a lack of toys to entertain myself with (my sister and I, growing up with a single mother who worked as a secretary — she stole office products so that I was kept in letter-size paper, pencils, pens). Perhaps too there were a lot of those months spent indoors in the either too-cold or too-hot/humid Midwest.
you get some really good distance if you throw it like a (american) football, managed to clear a couple city blocks once, thrown on a hot dry day from a high floor at school...
Because I am unsafe, I started making them from aluminum cans with the top/bottom cut off. Some strips of duct tape along one of the edges balances it (and so defines your leading edge).
The right wrist action was needed but you could send them sailing across an auditorium to clatter against the far wall.
My cousin and I were particularly destructive children and used to build paper airplanes and fly them up into the ceiling fan. Sometimes they'd get caught on a blade and come flying off. Was playing a lot of Starfox 64 at the time, so we imagined we were attacking a boss. We'd try and see how many attacks we could get in before our plane was completely mangled and wouldn't fly anymore. Good times.
Another destructive game we used to play was lighting army men on fire and fusing their melted plastic bodies together to create a zombie army of plastic amalgamations. Half-green, half-tan grenadiers with bazookas for a heads, etc. God bless America!
Hah, I flew planes into ceiling fans too! I also remember scraping my planes against the floor until holes wore into the paper, and seeing how well they could continue flying. There was something really cool about seeing a plane with so much accumulated damage still able to fly.
There's 48 designs, so this isn't much of a database, more like a short list. For something completely different, my favorite collection of paper planes are those by Jayson Merrill: https://www.youtube.com/@jayson5674 They're the most complex planes I've seen under the restrictions of no cuts and no adhesive. Here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-n6NAbJduk
The fact we have YouTube channels for people making paper airplanes, eating MREs and reviewing junk MP3 players is what keeps me optimistic of the Internet.
One time during a summer camp at my middle school I won a paper airplane contest with the basic because time aloft was a major contributor to scoring and a gust of wind caught my plane after I threw it and held it in the air for a while.
I mentioned after I'd won that I felt bad, it was luck that the wind came when it did and held it the way it did and the judge replied that other planes might not have caught the wind like mine did because mine was designed in such a way that it caught wind better.
The prize, ironically, was a book on how to make paper airplanes. I felt like that should have gone to the loser, but it was still cool.
When I was little (about 20 years ago) I found a website where you could download sheets to print out. They contained parts to cut out that would make an elaborate little glider airplane. You layered multiple layers of paper together and glued them. It included many different parts, but all of them were just paper in the end of the day.
I think the site is gone, I can't find it anymore. It had a blue background and about 10-20 designs available for download. It was either German, Swiss, Austrian, Italian or French, but I'm pretty sure it had multiple Languages.
FWIW, the site presents a variation of the origami design of Prof. James M. Sakoda of Brown University "winner of the origami award in the First International Paper Airplane Contest" in 1967 as published in that book.
One of my favorite research projects on the subject. This research publication from the 2014 siggraph conference covers a ML backed design optimization approach to design novel paper airplanes designs, and simulate flight paths.
I spent a very fun holiday break methodically working through these with my nephew and documenting how far we could get them to fly. Big takeaway is that simpler is better and the classics are classic for a reason!
That's cool! This reminds me of my experience in middle school when I used cardboard, bamboo sticks and rubber bands to make power paper airplanes, and the problem at that time was that in a short time after the plane was released, the propeller in front of the plane was driven by the rubber band to rotate very quickly, and if it could spin slower and lasts longer, the plane could fly farther, but I have not found a solution to this problem until now.
I had a book around the turn of the century with paper airplane folding instructions. Lazily, I stuck to the simple ones and my favourite was called "Phoenix". Could not find it on this page but searching for the book I found a video where the author demonstrates: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2V55rc58cDg
My childhood interest in paper airplanes was completely fuelled by the excellent https://archive.org/details/PAPERAIR , which you can now find on the Internet Archive by the link! The emulation is imperfect, though.
(disclaimer: not an aeronautic engineer) when you double an object, its weight increases by 8x (all three dimensions increase by 2x) but the wing area surface only becomes 4x larger. You thus end up with a worse lift-to-weight ratio.
In addition, the purpose of a regular plane is to transport goods and people while the purpose of a paper plane is to just float. The closest full scale objects to a paper plane would be gliders, which do ressemble paper-planes to some extent.
I still have a box of white wings from my childhood! I built a bunch of them but kept the unused ones in the box. I'll have to dig it out at some point.
I have an unused set of the original vintage kits. There are quite a number of loop wing and asymmetric ones. These are more advanced than paper airplanes.
This design scheme was consistently among the best (not on the website above directly): http://www.10paperairplanes.com/how-to-make-paper-airplanes/...
You could also just do what I did and just fold only the top over itself, and use a bit of the back wing for the winglets, folded out. Tiny, tiny grip, enough to hold, deeper in the back than the front for stability, tiny y in the wings and winglets going out slightly. The wings need to make a y when you drop it in the air (you can simulate this while holding this so you don't mess up your shot at a perfect first flight!). Make sure to fold the front extraordinarily tightly. Otherwise it starts to tank.
Then it's a matter of how hard you launch it. As a child, I was getting shockingly long flight times, and on those special days where there was a breeze...oh boy. What a world.
Super stable, super easy to make, super easy to teach, the hardest part is the arm, the patience to keep trying, the luck that it doesn't catch in a tree, and the patience to adjust the winglets for a nice little spiral.
A lovely part of my engineering days as a child, definitely helped get the creative juices going for this field! I had a white trash bag at one point with all of these novel little designs I came up with just for funsies. :)))) :D :)))) <3