Giant Paper Airplane Takes (Brief) Flight Over Arizona

The L.A. Times reports that 12-year-old Arturo Valdenegro's winning entry in a paper-airplane contest got upscaled to slightly larger dimensions, courtesy of Pima Air & Space Museum's Giant Paper Airplane Project, and flown, via helicopter assistance, in the Arizona desert. Slightly larger, in this case, means the plane based on Valdenegro's designs "was 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan and weighed in at a whopping 800 pounds," constructed of a tough, corrugated material called falcon board. Unfortunately, the tow didn't take the plane as high as planned (only 2,703 feet, instead of four or five thousand) so the resulting flight was brief and destructive — which doesn't make the accompanying launch video any less fun to watch, though I wish it showed more of the flight, including its end. (I tend to always make the same kind of acrobatic glider; do you have any good paper-airplane hints?)

Best paper plane, IMO

[mark-t]

It took me a few minutes of searching for me to find, since I did not know the name for this plane (or even if it had one), but here are some folding directions for what I consider to be the best paper plane ever: http://www.ncgraphicarts.com/ryan/other/eagleins.gif [ncgraphicarts.com]. When I was a kid, I had employed this paper design in a classroom competition, while almost everybody else was making the standard dart, I used this glider design, and mine was one of the few that cleared the entire length of the gymnasium (and would have kept on going right onto the stage at the end of the gym if the curtain had not been shut). I'm afraid I don't know what the dimensions of my school gym were, but I imagine they were typical for an elementary school.

My paper airplane site

[rwa2]

http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/aircraft/ [hairball.mine.nu] (/shameless plug)

Most planes like the one in the article sort of fly like darts, so of course it had a pretty lousy glide slope. They might have done a bit better with a glider design, that might have rode thermals for a while, but it probably would have been harder on the structural design.

My friends and I tried to make paper airplanes out of large poster boards back in high school, but they didn't do too well (one of my "reader's rides" on my site has video of an attempt to make a posterboard version one of my aircraft). Unfortunately, paper airplanes don't scale up very well. The best results I've seen look more like actual conventional glider aircraft that just happened to be built up using ribs and spars made of paper and covered with a light sheet of paper skinning material.

Re:As an European citizen...

[Dogtanian]

I lost interest after the summary. :( Seriously, America, when are you going to use meters and kilograms, again?

Of course, there's always the possibility that the parent AC is really just an American troll trying to stir up trouble, as we spell it "metres" in Britain.

They *could* be from elsewhere in Europe and using the American spelling when writing in English, but I wouldn't put the likelihood of trolldom past the OP... :-)