A Paper Airplane Like No Other

I remember loving to make paper airplanes as a kid. You start with the simple standard one that folds the page in half the long way. Open it up and make your triangles. Then fold those triangles in half. Then you fold out the triangle in half again, but this time in the opposite direction so that you get the wings to come out from the page. It's a simple plane, but can fly well. I must have made hundreds of those in my youth.

Then you learn about more styles that are a bit more complex. One involves creating two intersecting triangles that you open up and maneuver the page to do half of each fold. You can then tease some strips out of the back of the plane to make it do tricks. I've made hundreds of those as well.

In middle school, in order to encourage thinking in design and engineering, the school held a contest between all 5th through 8th graders for building paper airplanes. There were two categories: longest flight time, and furthest flown. I wanted to enter both categories.

If you have made paper airplanes, you know that there is a level that if you throw it too hard that it will kind of collapse in transit and not fly that far. I kept running into this problem with my planes. I tried to make a trick plane that would coast up, level, fall, speed up, and repeat. But, it was delicate and could not take much of a throw.

So, I decided to start from scratch on this plane by using parts of techniques from all the different styles of planes I knew. I made some decent ones, but they all failed when thrown hard.

This lead me to try to make a small, sturdy plane that would be able to be thrown hard and use that force, not grace to make it the furthest. I would make a plane, throw it, then tweak the folds, and try again. I did this over and over until the page was too flimsy to fly well and then I would start on a new one using the last folds as a template. I cannot remember the number of iterations of this I went through. Likely a couple of hours a day for several days.

The day before the competition, I was satisfied with my flight time plane and continued with my experiments on the distance plane. The plane had several layers in the cone for weight and protection from hits. The wings were stout and layered for strength. And no matter how hard I could throw this plane, it would not buckle. It just flew.

The contest for longest flight time happened. I "placed", but it was probably only in the top 5.

As for the longest flight, mine creamed all other planes. I had a pretty good arm as a kid. I was able to stand at the back end of the gym, chuck the plane, and it was only stopped by the wall at the other side of the building. No other plane made it even 2/3 the way from one end to the other.

I was so proud of what I had made and that I was able to throw it very well during the competition.

After it was all done, we all prepared to get back to our classes. Rick Somebody asked me to show him how I threw the plane. His plane didn't go very far. It collapsed when he threw it too hard. He was new to the area. I had come across him in the summer before school and we hung out a few times. He had bully tendencies, so I tried to limit his exposure to me. But, he seemed interested in my greatly designed plane and perhaps wanted to see how I was able to throw it without it collapsing.

Rick was very fast. Had he had some support at home and if he didn't like to get into trouble, I feel that he could have done very well in track in high school and maybe beyond that.

I threw the plane. It sored through the building, steady like an arrow. I had put some arch into it and it looked like a missile going through the air. Again, it hit the far wall of the building. I started to run to it and Rick sprinted. He made it to the plane a good 10 seconds before I did. Enough time for him to tear the plane into tiny pieces. Apparently, he was upset that I beat him in the competition.

The plane was shredded. And I had no idea on the exact steps I used to create it. My plan was to further develop the idea by creating fresh planes from the folds and go from there. He seemed delighted for a second when 12 year old me started crying. He had no idea of the amount of work or creativity that I had put into that.

There were some steps along the way that I had done and undone so many times that I could not recall. I put some effort into making it again. But the final product was never there. I didn't get as excited by paper airplanes after that. There went any ideas I had of becoming an airplane or aerospace engineer. Thank Rick.