Every day, there are hundreds of people all over the world who are showing Wilbur and Orville Wright that their feat of creating an aeroplane wasn’t really all THAT impressive. After all, all it takes is a simple piece of paper and a few clever folds, and you can create an airplane all your own as well! Paper Aeroplane Day celebrates this humble bit of aeronautics and reminds us of the role it played in our youth, and can still play in our present. According to my sources, it's also World Lindy Hop Day, but don't tell @jivedubbin or he'll get over-excited.
True story At the millennium stadium someone threw a paper plane from the top tier, it floated and floated, it seemed to go forever and landed past the half way line
I like to think I've come up with the perfect "dart", developed in the '80s on the fifth floor of the RCN offices in London over a two week period of doing an easy peasy temp job filling envelopes with ballot papers ..... It involves a small rip, and ideally a minute bit of sellotape, so the purists might not appreciate it, but I kid you not, it was blooomin' maaaarvellous! Might try one today.
This is the "square first" version which has a heavy front end making it more durable, but meaning more tweaking at the tail to compensate ... Not the weather for it here today but indoor tests looking promising
@bernjb56 , this thread of yours has brought back an interesting memory.... My Mechanics teacher at college was big into his planes, jets, pistons, paper planes, anything you name it, he was proper plane nerd. Indeed, in many many ways, he was a loverly chap, patient, full of good humour as we fumbled our way though Newton, vector mechanics, statics and so on. He's probably long gone now, but he was "of his age" and from a modern perspective, he was slightly flawed in more than one way! I would *not* trust him around the fairer sex for a start....but his second "passion", if you will, was dynamics and aeronautics, in particular. Now please bear in mind, this was the late 80's and the 486 PC was just coming to market. As student, we were all obsessed with electronics and computers, the ECU, anti lock brakes, robotics, mechatronics, microprocessors, the digital revolution, etc and what advances the computer could bring the world. Whereas, Mike was of the "white heat of technology jet age", he could use real slide ruler.... and so, to him, aeronautics was an intellectual obsession. To my generation, we just saw "the plane" as solved problem, after all Concorde was just down the road at Heathrow and it broke the sound barrier every day didn't it? OK, this is a generalization....but anyway... We used to drive the poor chap mad when we all switched off as he regaled us in fluid dynamics lectures with his equations interspersed with anecdotes about how this or that wing shape or aircraft was able to go, or not go, supersonic and why. One day, by way of revenge, on the last lecture of term, he made us construct paper planes from newspaper and sellotape. Now you can't make an @Dub and Dubber type plane from newspaper, well, not very well, certainly not at the scale in his "design brief" so we had to resort to trying to actually design something properly, with a sensible wing that created lift. Make me a glider he said......Well, imagine his delight when asking us..how does a wing work, does the low pressure above pull the wing up or the high pressure below push the wing up.... To make us focus, he made the project marked coursework!!! At the end of the two or three hours, he made us launch our contraptions from a the college stage across into the area below, I think we were on ladders or staging of some sort and he'd rigged up a sort of catapult and weight system F=ma etc Well imagine Mike's glee whenever a plane crashed into the ground, then using his Heath Robinson launch pad, so he knew the amount of launch energy put into the glider at "take off", he cited his various formulas at us and declared our efforts to be "no better than a projectile" and "make a better brick than a glider". I learnt more in that few hours than I had the whole term, but sadly he still didn't get computers nor these new fangled silicon chips and even when I knew him as a post-grad, he still didn't do Political Correctness, nevertheless I sill have very fond memories of Mike!
Have a "stable" now ... Left hand one is the more "honest" no-sellotape version ... Both from A4 sheets .... Plans for a small fee from eatmypaperplanetrail.co.uk
Thanks, took me 20 years to gain a true appreciation of Mike, a true teacher; I still wouldn't trust him if I had a daughter..
