10 ms·

Paper Airplane Designs (2013)

538 points by kkwteh 4y ago

beaker52 4y ago
Given the weather at the moment, I remember, as a kid, being astounded when I threw a paper airplane on a hot summers-day that didn't immediately come back down to earth like normal, but soared and soared and soared for minutes before I lost it. It blew my little kid mind.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  What a great feeling that must have been. 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.
  - beaker52 4y ago
    Amazing. I'm grateful for the way this universe creates magical experiences for us. Sometimes I wonder if it really is just an accident.
offsky 4y ago
Author of the website here. Always fun to see my site pop up in my own news feed. Happy to answer any questions.
la_fayette 4y ago
Homeoffice > Reading HN > Building Paperplanes with Kids ...
itsryanirl 4y ago
Has anyone done any research on which type of paper travels best? How does weight distribution play a factor? Does the type of paper impact the design of the plane you build?
anderspitman 4y ago
Is there a good biodegradable paper for making planes? There are lots of great buildings/bridges/mountains/cliffs that would be really fun to launch them off of.
maicro 4y ago
It might be fun to implement these in something like this origami simulator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31281700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31281700 https://origamisimulator.org https://origamisimulator.org ; that seems to have a bit of trouble with order-of-operation steps, but I think would still be interesting.
outworlder 4y ago
I really like the 'Fun Flyer', never knew it had a name. Although I like to do a variation where I fold the wing tips to create a kind of 'winglet'. And sometimes cut 'flaps' on the back of the wing to adjust the flight path. So the wings may end up looking like the 'king bee'
raylennon 4y ago
I remember making some of the more complicated ones as a kid but completely forgot about them as an adult. This brings back so many fond memories.
mg 4y ago
My favorite paper plane is the one that is explained starting at 03:00 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BNg4fDJC8A 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.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  The Nakamura Lock, a schoolyard classic worldwide. It has a name, but no apparent origin; an Eiji Nakamura did publish a book Flying Origami in 1972, but no such plane can be found within. 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 https://redd.it/j2yjsd)
  - navane 4y ago
    He is not folding the Nakamura lock, as far as my googling goes. The nakamura lock starts with a perfect 90 degrees tip (two 45 degree folds), whereas OP starts with two 22.5 degree folds that don't form a a tip).
- navane 4y ago
  Wow, after the first two folds, this plane really folds itself. 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.
dwaite 4y ago
I used to love making the ring wing glider: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider... In addition to being able to glide very far, you could launch it with a meter stick.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  I used to make the ones out of this book. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671555510 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.
2143 4y ago
Nice. 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.
- abc_lisper 4y ago
  What I came to say. Reading the first line I figured this is an Indian ;)
  - 2143 4y ago
    Yep, the relatively short plane with large wings. 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.
- vkdelta 4y ago
  Get a PPL if you really want to fly. It is much more accessible and you can make your dream come true.
  - 2143 4y ago
    Eventually I'd like to obtain a licence, at least the one for smaller planes. 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.
kqr 4y ago
My interest in science started when a friend and I folded a few paper planes, tested them over a small downhill section outside my house, made notes about what worked, tweaked and experimented with new designs, and so on. It blew my little mind that with structured experimentation you could design things that actually got better with each generation. Where would the improvements stop? 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.
- clankyclanker 4y ago
  The one in the YouTube video looks very similar to (or exactly like) one of the designs from one of the Klutz books around the turn of the millennium. I might’ve found it in the Explorabook? I’m pretty sure they called it the best paper airplane you’ll ever make, it even had the same wing flaps. 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 https://a.co/94zUS0G Turns out Klutz might’ve printed quite a few paper airplane instruction manuals.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    Explorabook is the best!! That big fresnel lens was the most amazing way to quickly start a fire! I mean not that I tried or anything :D Klutz made so many awesome books back then. I still have my Explorabook, Klutz Book of Knots, and "Juggling for the Complete Klutz" (and the original bean bags)... all super awesome stuff for a kid to enjoy and learn from!
carapace 4y ago
One of the finest paper airplanes is the origami design of Prof. James M. Sakoda of Brown University "winner of the origami award in the First Inernational Paper Airplane Contest" in 1967 and published in "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (Jerry Mander, George Dippel, Howard Gossage) https://i.imgur.com/Kv94Glf.png https://i.imgur.com/Kv94Glf.png
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Yes, that is perhaps my favorite. It always reminded me of the Orion space clipper in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey".
  - MrPoush 4y ago
    Did a fascination with paper airplanes inspire Glider, or was it just a happy coincidence?
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      Oh, definitely related. My single mom was a "secretary" and occasionally brought home typing paper for me to amuse myself with. I drew a lot of pictures, made a lot of paper airplanes. :-)
dang 4y ago
Related: Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466325 - Dec 2021 (8 comments) Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23545860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23545860 - June 2020 (8 comments) Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755 - Oct 2018 (206 comments) Real Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12632253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12632253 - Oct 2016 (1 comment)
- achow 4y ago
  Yes this website keeps popping up in HN. 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?
  - pvg 4y ago
    https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang%20duplicate%20detect&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - achow 4y ago
      Thanks. This thread gives some idea about the complexity, but still I'm none the wiser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206417
      - dang 4y ago
        The main thing to know is that reposts are fine after a year or so. pvg has already pointed this out but it's worth emphasizing. When I post "related" links like in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135274 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!
mod 4y ago
In fourth grade we had a paper airplane contest, but they had a restriction on the design: a circle about the size of a quarter was on the page, and no fold or crease could go through the circle. 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.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >my name was announced as the wrong-gendered version 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?
  - mod 4y ago
    Honestly, not that bad. Classmates openly laughed during announcements. The next day they issued a correction, which was worse than no correction. A few teases in the first week maybe, overall quite merciful.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I guess you had better friends that I did. I had a name "given" me that stuck all through school, and would probably still get mentioned by some of the asshats from back then.
- mcherm 4y ago
mgdlbp 4y ago
My friends and I could never get any of the pointy darts to work with a hard throw--they never had the right balance not to loop or nosedive at high speed. What we settled on as the most satisfying to hurl is this design (found online widely under this name; requires letter proportion paper): https://www.instructables.com/The-Hammer-Paper-Airplane/ https://www.instructables.com/The-Hammer-Paper-Airplane/ 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 https://www.origamiway.com/plane-spy-plane.shtml
jankovicsandras 4y ago
Very cool. 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)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216
screwgoth 4y ago
Nice. Can't wait to try out some of thee with my 11-year old. At one point of time we used to be obsessed with paper planes ... and that's when we only knew 2-3 designs.
Scandiravian 4y ago
My father was a high school math teacher and he would borrow books on paper plane folding at the library, then photocopy the books with the photocopier at his school 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
enviclash 4y ago
Great pedagogical resource, I am in parental leave and might spend our afternoons with the kids with this foa a couple of days :) thx!
elevaet 4y ago
I've noticed that in N. America "The Dart" is the standard and in S.E. Asia kids fold something that's like a hybrid between "The Dart" and "The Buzz" that flies really well. I've never had much luck with the dart, it's usually really unstable.
bdg 4y ago
As a kid I had a great book with lots of science experiments in it called "Science Is" (Author: Susan V. Bosak) 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 https://www.exploratorium.edu/science_explorer/hoopster.html
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  The French C.450 Coleoptere had a cylinder wing which provided plenty of lift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unz6mfjS4ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unz6mfjS4ws
- jhanschoo 4y ago
  Let me guess how this works: from the nose view, the paper strips being at one side cause the stick to angle toward it, since the center of mass is close to the stick than the center of the drag force due to the stick's relatively small cross section for its mass. This causes the craft to keep pitching up. In addition, the same difference in cross sections between the hoops and the the stick from the plan view give it roll stability. Meanwhile, the larger hoop being at the back causes more drag, giving it yaw stability.
- shard 4y ago
  It's not clear from the webpage, but does it do something different from a paper airplane with just 1 hoop like this? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider...
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I would make variations of those ring gliders from an aluminum coke cans cut down to half-height, something heavy like dict tape on the leading edge to provide weight. You throw them fast and underhanded imparting a bit of spin — they'll sail across a gymnasium.
jfk13 4y ago
In my childhood, our reference for paper planes was Capt. Barnaby's classic: http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/More/Misc/How_To_Make_&_Fly_Paper_Airplanes.pdf http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/More/Misc/How_To_Ma...
- ThinkingGuy 4y ago
  For me, it was "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (which I was happy to discover is now available for borrowing on the Internet Archive): https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00jerr https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00jerr I went through 2 physical copies cutting out all the patterns to make the various planes.
photochemsyn 4y ago
While they'r not in the foldable category, the paper plane designs of Yasuaki Ninomiya are pretty incredible, though apparently no longer produced commercially. https://bluegrassroots.ninja/whitewings https://bluegrassroots.ninja/whitewings
- dls2016 4y ago
  I still have a some un-assembled Whitewings on my bookshelf! The book that came with it was pack full of design details.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
daveslash 4y ago
If you uncheck all boxes, except "easy", then you get this plane recommendation [0] which is note listed on the landing page by default. Easy, but with 100+ folds. [0] https://www.foldnfly.com/404.html#The-Goof-Up https://www.foldnfly.com/404.html#The-Goof-Up

538 points by kkwteh 4y ago

Given the weather at the moment, I remember, as a kid, being astounded when I threw a paper airplane on a hot summers-day that didn't immediately come back down to earth like normal, but soared and soared and soared for minutes before I lost it. It blew my little kid mind.

themodelplumber 4y ago
What a great feeling that must have been. 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.
- beaker52 4y ago
  Amazing. I'm grateful for the way this universe creates magical experiences for us. Sometimes I wonder if it really is just an accident.

offsky 4y ago

Author of the website here. Always fun to see my site pop up in my own news feed. Happy to answer any questions.

la_fayette 4y ago

Homeoffice > Reading HN > Building Paperplanes with Kids ...

itsryanirl 4y ago

Has anyone done any research on which type of paper travels best? How does weight distribution play a factor? Does the type of paper impact the design of the plane you build?

anderspitman 4y ago

Is there a good biodegradable paper for making planes? There are lots of great buildings/bridges/mountains/cliffs that would be really fun to launch them off of.

maicro 4y ago

It might be fun to implement these in something like this origami simulator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31281700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31281700 https://origamisimulator.org https://origamisimulator.org ; that seems to have a bit of trouble with order-of-operation steps, but I think would still be interesting.

outworlder 4y ago

I really like the 'Fun Flyer', never knew it had a name. Although I like to do a variation where I fold the wing tips to create a kind of 'winglet'. And sometimes cut 'flaps' on the back of the wing to adjust the flight path. So the wings may end up looking like the 'king bee'

raylennon 4y ago

I remember making some of the more complicated ones as a kid but completely forgot about them as an adult. This brings back so many fond memories.

mg 4y ago

My favorite paper plane is the one that is explained starting at 03:00 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BNg4fDJC8A 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.

mgdlbp 4y ago
The Nakamura Lock, a schoolyard classic worldwide. It has a name, but no apparent origin; an Eiji Nakamura did publish a book Flying Origami in 1972, but no such plane can be found within. 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 https://redd.it/j2yjsd)
- navane 4y ago
  He is not folding the Nakamura lock, as far as my googling goes. The nakamura lock starts with a perfect 90 degrees tip (two 45 degree folds), whereas OP starts with two 22.5 degree folds that don't form a a tip).
navane 4y ago
Wow, after the first two folds, this plane really folds itself. 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.

dwaite 4y ago

I used to love making the ring wing glider: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider... In addition to being able to glide very far, you could launch it with a meter stick.

sumtechguy 4y ago
I used to make the ones out of this book. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671555510 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.

2143 4y ago

Nice. 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.

abc_lisper 4y ago
What I came to say. Reading the first line I figured this is an Indian ;)
- 2143 4y ago
  Yep, the relatively short plane with large wings. 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.
vkdelta 4y ago
Get a PPL if you really want to fly. It is much more accessible and you can make your dream come true.
- 2143 4y ago
  Eventually I'd like to obtain a licence, at least the one for smaller planes. 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.

kqr 4y ago

My interest in science started when a friend and I folded a few paper planes, tested them over a small downhill section outside my house, made notes about what worked, tweaked and experimented with new designs, and so on. It blew my little mind that with structured experimentation you could design things that actually got better with each generation. Where would the improvements stop? 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.

clankyclanker 4y ago
The one in the YouTube video looks very similar to (or exactly like) one of the designs from one of the Klutz books around the turn of the millennium. I might’ve found it in the Explorabook? I’m pretty sure they called it the best paper airplane you’ll ever make, it even had the same wing flaps. 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 https://a.co/94zUS0G Turns out Klutz might’ve printed quite a few paper airplane instruction manuals.
- amatecha 4y ago
  Explorabook is the best!! That big fresnel lens was the most amazing way to quickly start a fire! I mean not that I tried or anything :D Klutz made so many awesome books back then. I still have my Explorabook, Klutz Book of Knots, and "Juggling for the Complete Klutz" (and the original bean bags)... all super awesome stuff for a kid to enjoy and learn from!

carapace 4y ago

One of the finest paper airplanes is the origami design of Prof. James M. Sakoda of Brown University "winner of the origami award in the First Inernational Paper Airplane Contest" in 1967 and published in "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (Jerry Mander, George Dippel, Howard Gossage) https://i.imgur.com/Kv94Glf.png https://i.imgur.com/Kv94Glf.png

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Yes, that is perhaps my favorite. It always reminded me of the Orion space clipper in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey".
- MrPoush 4y ago
  Did a fascination with paper airplanes inspire Glider, or was it just a happy coincidence?
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Oh, definitely related. My single mom was a "secretary" and occasionally brought home typing paper for me to amuse myself with. I drew a lot of pictures, made a lot of paper airplanes. :-)

dang 4y ago

Related: Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466325 - Dec 2021 (8 comments) Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23545860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23545860 - June 2020 (8 comments) Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755 - Oct 2018 (206 comments) Real Paper Airplane Designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12632253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12632253 - Oct 2016 (1 comment)

achow 4y ago
Yes this website keeps popping up in HN. 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?
- pvg 4y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang%20duplicate%20detect&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - achow 4y ago
    Thanks. This thread gives some idea about the complexity, but still I'm none the wiser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206417
    - dang 4y ago
      The main thing to know is that reposts are fine after a year or so. pvg has already pointed this out but it's worth emphasizing. When I post "related" links like in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135274 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!

mod 4y ago

In fourth grade we had a paper airplane contest, but they had a restriction on the design: a circle about the size of a quarter was on the page, and no fold or crease could go through the circle. 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.

dylan604 4y ago
>my name was announced as the wrong-gendered version 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?
- mod 4y ago
  Honestly, not that bad. Classmates openly laughed during announcements. The next day they issued a correction, which was worse than no correction. A few teases in the first week maybe, overall quite merciful.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I guess you had better friends that I did. I had a name "given" me that stuck all through school, and would probably still get mentioned by some of the asshats from back then.
mcherm 4y ago

mgdlbp 4y ago

My friends and I could never get any of the pointy darts to work with a hard throw--they never had the right balance not to loop or nosedive at high speed. What we settled on as the most satisfying to hurl is this design (found online widely under this name; requires letter proportion paper): https://www.instructables.com/The-Hammer-Paper-Airplane/ https://www.instructables.com/The-Hammer-Paper-Airplane/ 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 https://www.origamiway.com/plane-spy-plane.shtml

jankovicsandras 4y ago

Very cool. 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)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216

screwgoth 4y ago

Nice. Can't wait to try out some of thee with my 11-year old. At one point of time we used to be obsessed with paper planes ... and that's when we only knew 2-3 designs.

Scandiravian 4y ago

My father was a high school math teacher and he would borrow books on paper plane folding at the library, then photocopy the books with the photocopier at his school 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

enviclash 4y ago

Great pedagogical resource, I am in parental leave and might spend our afternoons with the kids with this foa a couple of days :) thx!

elevaet 4y ago

I've noticed that in N. America "The Dart" is the standard and in S.E. Asia kids fold something that's like a hybrid between "The Dart" and "The Buzz" that flies really well. I've never had much luck with the dart, it's usually really unstable.

bdg 4y ago

As a kid I had a great book with lots of science experiments in it called "Science Is" (Author: Susan V. Bosak) 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 https://www.exploratorium.edu/science_explorer/hoopster.html

swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
The French C.450 Coleoptere had a cylinder wing which provided plenty of lift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unz6mfjS4ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unz6mfjS4ws
jhanschoo 4y ago
Let me guess how this works: from the nose view, the paper strips being at one side cause the stick to angle toward it, since the center of mass is close to the stick than the center of the drag force due to the stick's relatively small cross section for its mass. This causes the craft to keep pitching up. In addition, the same difference in cross sections between the hoops and the the stick from the plan view give it roll stability. Meanwhile, the larger hoop being at the back causes more drag, giving it yaw stability.
shard 4y ago
It's not clear from the webpage, but does it do something different from a paper airplane with just 1 hoop like this? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider...
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I would make variations of those ring gliders from an aluminum coke cans cut down to half-height, something heavy like dict tape on the leading edge to provide weight. You throw them fast and underhanded imparting a bit of spin — they'll sail across a gymnasium.

jfk13 4y ago

In my childhood, our reference for paper planes was Capt. Barnaby's classic: http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/More/Misc/How_To_Make_&_Fly_Paper_Airplanes.pdf http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/More/Misc/How_To_Ma...

ThinkingGuy 4y ago
For me, it was "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (which I was happy to discover is now available for borrowing on the Internet Archive): https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00jerr https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00jerr I went through 2 physical copies cutting out all the patterns to make the various planes.

photochemsyn 4y ago

While they'r not in the foldable category, the paper plane designs of Yasuaki Ninomiya are pretty incredible, though apparently no longer produced commercially. https://bluegrassroots.ninja/whitewings https://bluegrassroots.ninja/whitewings

dls2016 4y ago
I still have a some un-assembled Whitewings on my bookshelf! The book that came with it was pack full of design details.

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daveslash 4y ago

If you uncheck all boxes, except "easy", then you get this plane recommendation [0] which is note listed on the landing page by default. Easy, but with 100+ folds. [0] https://www.foldnfly.com/404.html#The-Goof-Up https://www.foldnfly.com/404.html#The-Goof-Up