The Paper Airplane Laboratory

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The Paper Airplane Laboratory

Welcome to the Lab!

Ellie says: Hi!! This is our paper airplane page. My dad and I have been making paper airplanes since I was in second grade, but this year we got SERIOUS. Every Thursday night the school lets parents use the gym for "open gym" and while everybody else plays basketball, we take over the far end with a tape measure, a stopwatch and about forty airplanes. The basketball people think we are weird. We think they are missing out.

Dad says: I'm the one who gets to pick up the planes. Ellie is the one who writes down the numbers in the Official Lab Notebook (a green spiral notebook with a lot of stickers on it), and she is the reason this page exists, because she wanted to put our records "on the Internet where they count." So here they are. We typed this up on the family computer over a couple of rainy weekends and it is Ellie's first web page, so be kind. The gym is a little over 90 feet long, which turns out to be just barely enough.

Everything on this page works with regular 8½ x 11 copier paper. You don't need anything fancy. You do need a table with a hard, flat top to fold on (NOT the couch, we learned).

The Six Planes

These are our six regular designs. We made them all up ourselves or changed other ones until they were different enough that we felt okay naming them. (Okay, the Dart is basically THE paper airplane that everybody's uncle knows how to make. But ours has an extra fold.) Instructions are in words because our scanner is broken and Dad's drawings look like spaghetti. Read each step all the way through before you fold.

A few words we use: "Lengthwise" means the long way, so the paper is tall and skinny. "The center crease" is the line you get when you fold the paper in half lengthwise and open it back up. "Nose" is the front, "tail" is the back. "Crease hard" means run your fingernail along the fold.

1. The Dart Our distance plane. Fast and pointy.

Fold the paper in half lengthwise, crease hard, and open it back up. That's your center crease.
Fold the two top corners down so they meet at the center crease. The top is now a point, like a house roof.
Now fold the two new slanted edges in to the center crease too. The nose gets even pointier and the plane looks like a long skinny arrow.
The extra fold: fold the pointed nose back about one inch toward the tail, so the very tip is blunt. (This keeps the nose from bending when it hits the wall, and it moves a little weight forward.)
Fold the whole thing in half along the center crease, with the folded flaps on the OUTSIDE.
Make the wings: fold each side down so the wing edge lines up with the bottom of the body. Both wings should match exactly. Open the wings up so they are flat and level.

Throw it hard and level, like you are throwing a dart at a dartboard, not up in the air.

2. The Glider Our hang-time plane. Big wings, slow and floaty.

Start with the paper lengthwise. Fold the top edge down about one inch. Crease hard.
Fold that same edge down again, one more inch. And again, one more time. You now have a thick band across the top of the paper. That band is the nose weight.
Fold the paper in half lengthwise so the thick band is on the OUTSIDE.
Make the wings: fold each side down, but leave only about a half inch of body at the bottom. The wings should be really wide.
Fold the last half inch of each wing tip straight up to make little winglets. They help the Glider fly straight.
Open the wings so they are level, or even tilted a tiny bit up in a shallow "Y" shape.

Throw it gently, a little bit upward. If it dives, bend the back edges of the wings up just a hair. If it climbs and then stalls (see "Why Do Planes Fly" below), you need more weight in the nose: add one paper clip.

3. The Hornet A locked-nose dart. Ellie's second favorite. Bounces off walls without bending.

Do steps 1 and 2 of the Dart (center crease, then top corners to the center).
Fold the point straight down toward you so the tip lands about two inches above the bottom edge. The top of the paper is now flat, like an envelope with the flap folded down.
Fold the two top corners in to the center crease again. They will lie on top of the big flap you just folded, and there will be a little triangle of the flap sticking out at the bottom of them.
Fold that little triangle UP over the two corners. This locks everything together. This is the "hornet's stinger" and it's the trick that makes the whole plane.
Fold in half along the center crease with the lock on the OUTSIDE.
Fold the wings down about one inch from the bottom of the body. Level them out.

Medium-hard throw, level. This one flies almost as far as the Dart and lasts about ten times as long.

4. The Ring Not even shaped like a plane. Ellie's FAVORITE. The basketball people always stop to look at this one.

Start with the paper lengthwise. Fold the top edge down about three-quarters of an inch. Crease hard.
Fold it down again the same amount. And again, and again, until you have folded it five times. You will have a thick band with a big flap of plain paper hanging below it.
Cut or carefully tear off the plain flap so you're left with just the thick band. (Save the flap for a Cone, below.)
Curl the band into a circle, with the thick folded part on the OUTSIDE of the circle. Tuck one end into the other end's folds. A little piece of tape helps.
Gently round it out so it's a nice circle. Ours ends up about 3 inches across.

Hold it like a football with the thick edge FORWARD and throw it with a little spin. It flies like a Frisbee that's standing up. Best hang time of anything we've made, and it never noses into the floor.

5. The Condor Long skinny wings. Dad's favorite. Needs a paper clip.

Turn the paper SIDEWAYS (the wide way, 11 inches across). Fold it in half so the fold runs from left to right, and open it back up.
Fold the top edge down to the center crease. Then fold that band down again to the center crease, so it's a thick strip along the middle. Fold the bottom half up behind it, so the thick strip is the leading (front) edge of one very long, very skinny wing.
Fold the whole wing in half, short edge to short edge, so you have a body crease in the middle. Open it back to a shallow "V."
Bend up the last inch of each wing tip for winglets.
Slide ONE paper clip onto the thick front edge, right in the middle. Without it, the Condor flips over backward. With it, it glides forever.

Throw it slow and gentle, straight ahead, holding it by the middle from underneath. If it turns, move the clip a smidge toward the other side.

6. The Loop-de-Loop A stunt plane. Does a full loop and comes back near your feet.

Make a Dart (steps 1 through 6), but skip the extra nose fold in step 4. You want the nose light.
On the back edge of each wing, tear or cut two little slits about a half inch apart, an inch in from the body. Bend the flap between the slits UP. These are the "elevators." Bend both of them up the same amount, a lot, almost straight up.
Bend the wing tips up a little too.

Throw it HARD and straight UP, or hard and level. Straight up, it goes over the top and loops. Level, it climbs, loops, and lands behind you. Ellie got it to do two loops once and we have witnesses.

Bonus: the Cone. Take the leftover flap from the Ring, roll it into a cone like a party hat, tape it, and throw it point first. It's not a plane, but it goes straighter than you'd think, and it's good for the accuracy contest.

The Official Record Book

Records are from the school gym on Thursday nights, copied straight from the Lab Notebook. Distance is measured with Dad's 100-foot tape from the throwing line to where the plane FIRST touches the floor (not where it slides to). Hang time is Mom's stopwatch from the moment the plane leaves your hand to the moment it touches anything. Best out of five throws.

Plane	Best distance	Best hang time	Record holder / date
The Dart	71 ft 4 in	2.1 sec	Dad, Sept. 16. (Ellie: 58 ft 9 in, Sept. 23, and she is catching up)
The Glider	44 ft 2 in	5.3 sec	Hang time: Ellie, Sept. 9. Distance: Dad, Aug. 26
The Hornet	66 ft 0 in	2.6 sec	Ellie, Sept. 23 (a family record for Ellie in distance!)
The Ring	39 ft 6 in	6.8 sec (LAB RECORD)	Ellie, Sept. 2. Nobody has come close, including Dad, who has tried a LOT
The Condor	52 ft 11 in	5.9 sec	Dad, Sept. 9 (one paper clip, thrown from a chair, which we then decided was cheating, so it has an asterisk)
The Loop-de-Loop	n/a	4.4 sec	Ellie, Sept. 16. Two complete loops, witnessed by Mrs. Alvarez from the basketball side

Gym record, any plane, distance: 71 ft 4 in (Dad, Dart). We are pretty sure a good Dart could go the whole 90 feet if we could get a running start, but the rule is feet behind the line. Gym record, hang time: 6.8 seconds (Ellie, Ring).

Sept. 23 update: Ellie beat 60 feet with the Hornet. There was some yelling. The basketball game stopped.

Why Do Planes Fly? (What We Figured Out)

Dad says: Ellie asked me this in about week two, and I gave her a wrong answer, and then we went to the library and got a real one. Here it is in plain words. There are four pushes and pulls on a plane, paper or otherwise: lift (up), gravity (down), thrust (forward) and drag (backward). A paper airplane only gets thrust once, from your arm. After that it's a glider, and it's all about lift, drag and gravity.

Lift. As the wing moves forward through the air, it's tilted up just a little at the front. That tilt pushes air downward as the wing goes by. When the wing pushes air down, the air pushes the wing up. (That's Newton's third law: for every push there's an equal push back the other way.) At the same time, the air going over the top of the wing ends up at lower pressure than the air under the wing, and higher pressure underneath pushes up. Both of those are the same lift, described two ways. Bigger wings push more air, so they make more lift at a slow speed, which is why the Glider and the Condor float and the Dart doesn't.

Too much tilt is bad. If the front of the wing tilts up too steeply, the air can't follow the top of the wing smoothly anymore, it gets all swirly, and the lift mostly disappears. That's called a stall. On a paper airplane, a stall looks like this: the plane climbs, slows down, hangs there for a second, then the nose drops and it dives. If your plane does that, it's stalling.

Drag. Drag is the air pushing back on anything moving through it. Stick your hand out the car window flat and then sideways and you'll feel the difference. A pointy, narrow plane (the Dart) has less drag, so it keeps its speed and goes far. A wide, floppy plane has more drag. Crumply folds, bent wing tips, and fat noses all add drag. This is why we crease hard.

The center of gravity. This is the big one, and it's the thing that fixed most of our planes. The center of gravity is the balance point: if you could balance the plane on your fingertip, that's the spot. The wings also have a spot where all their lift adds up, which is somewhere around the middle of the wing, front to back. For a plane to fly steady, the balance point needs to be a little bit AHEAD of that lift spot. Then the nose wants to drop a bit, the bent-up back edges of the wings hold it up, and the whole thing settles into a smooth glide. If the balance point is too far back, the nose pitches up, the plane stalls, dives, and maybe loops (which is how the Loop-de-Loop works on purpose). If the balance point is too far forward, the plane just noses into the floor.

So: if it stalls, add nose weight (a paper clip, or one more nose fold). If it dives, take some off, or bend the back edges of the wings up a little. That's practically the whole secret of paper airplanes, and it took us until August to learn it.

Ellie says: Also, the winglets. Air likes to sneak around the tips of the wings from the bottom (high pressure) to the top (low pressure) and make little tornadoes, which is drag. Winglets get in the way of that. Real airliners have them. I saw them on the plane to Grandma's.

Paper Airplane Day: Friday, October 22, 1999

Ellie's school is having its fall Paper Airplane Day in the gym on Friday, October 22, during the last two periods. Fourth, fifth and sixth grades. Dad is one of the parent judges, which Ellie thinks is a conflict of interest, so he will be judging a different grade. Mrs. Alvarez asked us to put the rules up here so kids can practice. Here they are, copied from the sheet that went home:

Events

Distance. Longest flight from the throwing line to where the plane first touches the floor. Three throws, best one counts.
Hang time. Longest time in the air from your hand until it touches anything (floor, wall, ceiling, a person). Three throws, best one counts. Two timers with stopwatches; the times get averaged.
Accuracy. A hula hoop is laid on the floor 25 feet from the line. Three throws. Two points for landing inside the hoop, one point for touching it. Most points wins.

Rules

One sheet of regular 8½ x 11 paper. Copier paper, notebook paper or construction paper. No card stock, no cardboard.
You may cut, tear and fold. You may use ONE standard paper clip. Tape is allowed only for the accuracy event.
No staples, no glue, no weights except the one paper clip.
Build your plane AT school, that day, at the folding tables. You can bring instructions (like these!) but not a plane that's already made.
Both feet behind the line when you let go. Stepping over = that throw doesn't count. No running starts.
A plane that hits the ceiling in the distance event is measured where it lands anyway. (Dad argued for this rule.)
Be nice. Cheer for everybody. Retrieve your own plane.

What we'd bring if we were you: a ruler (for even wing folds), a pencil (to mark your folds), and a plane design you have ALREADY practiced at home so you know how it flies. The Dart for distance, the Ring or Glider for hang time, and the Hornet or the Cone for accuracy is our advice. Ellie is entering all three events and has not decided on her accuracy plane yet. It will probably be the Hornet. Or the Cone. She changes her mind every Thursday.

Ellie's Tips!!

Fold on a table. A hard one. Not your bed, not the car, not your lap.
Crease with your fingernail. Or the edge of a ruler. Soft folds = floppy plane = bad.
Make the wings the SAME. Hold the plane up and look at it from the front. If one wing is higher, fix it. This is the #1 thing wrong with everybody's planes.
For distance, throw LEVEL and hard. Not up. Everybody throws up. Up makes it stall.
For hang time, throw UP and gentle. Like you're putting it on a high shelf. The opposite of distance.
Test where there's no wind. Turn off the fan. Close the window. Outside is fun but it's not for records.
If it stalls, paper clip on the nose. If it dives, bend the back of the wings up a tiny bit. (See Dad's part above. It's actually true.)
Bend the wing tips up a little if it keeps turning. Bend the one on the side it's turning AWAY from... actually just try both. Trying stuff is the whole point.
Write down what you did. Even the bad throws. That's why it's a laboratory.
Don't throw at your brother. Even the Ring. Even though it's soft. Trust me.

Other Flying Things on GeoCities.us

Steve's Model Rocketry Page - when paper isn't enough. Ellie wants a rocket for Christmas. We'll see.

Shuttle Launch Viewing Guide - a lady in Florida who has seen a LOT of launches. Field trip someday?

Skywatch: Satellites You Can See - things that fly a whole lot higher than 6.8 seconds' worth.

Mr. Delgado's 7th Grade Science - Ellie is going to be in 7th grade in two years and has already looked at this.

Back to the Cape Canaveral neighborhood

Coming soon: a page just for the Ring with more sizes, and results from Paper Airplane Day (Oct. 22). Ellie also wants a "Hall of Crashes."

You are visitor number

to the Lab since July 1999. (Ellie checks this number every day.)

Got a plane that beats ours? Send us the instructions and your numbers: [email protected]
(Dad reads the mail first. Ellie answers it.)

Last updated: September 24, 1999