I have a story to share. In 1978 as a preteen, my mother made me take piano lessons. God bless her for trying. Anyway, while waiting for my class in the lobby of the music school, I would often make paper airplanes. One day, an older gentleman came over and said that he wanted to gift me something. What he gave me was his copy of "The great international paper airplane book". And remains one of my cherished books or really possessions. But I'm getting older now and feel that the time has come for me to find a 13-year-old worthy of this gift. But it's quite a leap of faith, for me anyway, to convey such a gift.
In first grade, visible from my assigned lunch seat in the cafeteria, was a yellowing paper airplane on top of an exposed ventilation duct. It was there for a few years, too.
I have a copy of this!! It is one of my favorite books on paper airplanes. Great designs, great layout… I’ve occasionally tried modifying some of them to be made out of balsa with various levels of success.
I just don't know if it would work well as a library book, since the pages are meant to be cut out and folded up into planes. Of course, a responsible child would refrain from doing so and just copy the designs onto their own sheets of paper.
I was reminded of this book immediately! A savior for a boring afternoon. It was like knowing how to tie elaborate knots. You learned some killer designs that made you king of the paper airplane at school.
Yup. In 7th grade during recess we made airplanes. One day I made a Barnaby and threw it up in the air. It caught an updraft and just disappeared into the clouds. With that, I became a paper airplane legend at school.
My dad worked overtime in the evening a fair bit. He'd often bring me when I was a young teen. The building was several stories tall with a huge open central core, just a flight of stairs on one end.
I'd go to the top floor, take a bunch of paper from the printer room and fold planes, and send them out into the central space. Go back, tweak the design or try something new, launch again.
Don't think I came up with any good designs, but I had a lot of fun trying various ideas.
Yeah, it is easy to try to correct the situation as an adult afterwards. This was just an account of my feelings then.
And as I mentioned below - maybe exactly this was in the way from making the best paper plane ever, that could fly all the way to my neighbour? What did I know?
My technique was always 1) fold along the line you want to cut (makes it straight—maybe parallel if you have a good eye), 2) use your tongue to wet the creased edge, 3) open and re-fold along the same crease but for the opposite side (valley becomes mountain fold), 4) wet the creased edge again… It was easy enough to tear along the fold at that point.
The instructions were just there and I was certain it was the best plane ever if I just had the right paper format. And that they failed had nothing to do with my folding skills.
Nothing will ever replace Campbell Morris' Advanced Paper Aircraft Construction volumes 1-3 (or was it 4) for me, but this looks modern and ideal for young and aspiring ballistic cellulose aeronautical engineers.
That's a cool website. Is there a benchmark for these? I noticed some of these have scores ("Flies over x feet!") and some don't.
Mostly I'm just curious, how well does the standard crappy paper airplane fly, which every kid makes in school, how well does it fly relative to some of these world record winners? (Some of which have a lot more folds and measuring and tape than I was expecting!)
Click on the first design, only way to learn how to fold is with a 10 minute YouTube video with plenty of the usual padding to get it to 10 minutes+ and "if you don't have the template" spread throughout.
So basically just buy the $35 worth of books and templates they're selling if you actually want to do this instead of playing and pausing a YT video a hundred times to get through this.
I think I'll fire up Publisher '97 and relive my paper plane memories.
Come on! They're selling you books in the $20 range and using free (if slightly tedious) videos to promote said books in a polite and non-pushy way. I can't believe this upsets people!
Yes. Personal anecdote. I won the 1978 UCLA paper airplane contest by exactly this method.
There was a good design floating around (locally?) called a Pasquali [1]. In the couple of hours before the contest. I folded about a dozen of the design and tested them. The individual plane that flew best is the one that I flew in the contest.
(If you happen to know the UCLA campus, the plane was launched from the top of Boelter Hall -- about 3 floors up from memory. It flew all the way across the Engineering Quad to the raised courtyard between the Geology and Chemistry buildings.)
[1] If anybody here happens to know of this design, I've forgotten all of the details other than the name. I'd love to recover it! Sadly, the actual paper airplane is long lost.
My son watched a ton of this at age ~8 or so. He built some really crazy stuff from memory and our house was full of great designs for like a year. Pretty great channel imo.
21.jul.2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36784032 25 comments
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https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00jerr/mode/1up
I'd go to the top floor, take a bunch of paper from the printer room and fold planes, and send them out into the central space. Go back, tweak the design or try something new, launch again.
Don't think I came up with any good designs, but I had a lot of fun trying various ideas.
Obviously the book was translated from US.
I don't remember how bad it was in practice but I remember it made me sad.
(It's okay, I learned immediately how to rectify, uh, squarify, the situation.)
And as I mentioned below - maybe exactly this was in the way from making the best paper plane ever, that could fly all the way to my neighbour? What did I know?
Interestingly, paper A4 wide (210mm?) by letter tall (11") is a thing in the TeX community.
That a4 x 11" document size prints correctly on A4 or letter without scaling or cropping (the margins just change)
My experience is that it is quite difficult to cut the sheet precisely enough if you just use a normal pair of scissors.
The instructions were just there and I was certain it was the best plane ever if I just had the right paper format. And that they failed had nothing to do with my folding skills.
- Can't sort the airplanes
- Instructions are video only
Mostly I'm just curious, how well does the standard crappy paper airplane fly, which every kid makes in school, how well does it fly relative to some of these world record winners? (Some of which have a lot more folds and measuring and tape than I was expecting!)
So basically just buy the $35 worth of books and templates they're selling if you actually want to do this instead of playing and pausing a YT video a hundred times to get through this.
I think I'll fire up Publisher '97 and relive my paper plane memories.
There was a good design floating around (locally?) called a Pasquali [1]. In the couple of hours before the contest. I folded about a dozen of the design and tested them. The individual plane that flew best is the one that I flew in the contest.
(If you happen to know the UCLA campus, the plane was launched from the top of Boelter Hall -- about 3 floors up from memory. It flew all the way across the Engineering Quad to the raised courtyard between the Geology and Chemistry buildings.)
[1] If anybody here happens to know of this design, I've forgotten all of the details other than the name. I'd love to recover it! Sadly, the actual paper airplane is long lost.
- Every action takes 3-10 seconds, including pressing on regular ass links
- There's a big yellow button "Fold planes" on main page that redirects you to the main page?
- Login is a blue text on blue background
- You have to click on the image of the plane to get to it's page, clicking on text doesn't work (small thing, but very unintuitive)
Is there something wrong with my browser, or it's a website?
If you're interested the link to the other related site has more step by step instructions: https://www.foldnfly.com/#/1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-1