Paper airplane ideas and tips

Paper airplane ideas and tips(foldnfly.com)

163 points by mottiden 2 years ago | 25 comments

metadat 2 years ago |

Discussed previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087442 (2 months ago, 79 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134691 (1 year ago, 96 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755 (5 years ago, 208 comments)

throwaway019254 2 years ago |

> The back of the wings can be adjusted to steer your paper airplane. Bend the wings up to make the airplane dive and bend the wings down to make the airplane climb.

Isn't it the other way around?

chkgk 2 years ago | |

If the elevator is behind the center of mass/lift they need to push the back down, so they need to point up to raise the nose of the aircraft (other side of cg/cl).

If the surfaces are in the front of cg/cl, they need to do the opposite. To pull the nose up, they would have to point downwards.

davethedevguy 2 years ago | | |

Exactly. The site calls them ailerons (presumably because they are on the wing and can roll the plane) but they are quite far back from the cg and so function more like elevators when used together.

Concorde worked this way [1], and called them 'elevons'. When I used to work on Tornados these were called 'tailerons'.

[1] https://www.heritageconcorde.com/roll-pitch-and-yaw

Edit: The original site actually describes them correctly here, so I assume the text on the front-page is just a typo: https://www.foldnfly.com/lounge/steer-aim.php#elevon

hug 2 years ago | |

I’m so curious as to the answer here. My intuition says you’re right, but my second-questioning brain says “maybe the people who run a site about nothing but paper planes got it right the first time”.

Is there something about the aerodynamics of paper planes that I don’t understand? Probably!

moconnor 2 years ago | | |

The site is wrong. Ailerons up makes the nose rotate upwards and the plane climb and vice versa. This is easy to try!

black6 2 years ago | |

You would think that the quasi-ailerons would deflect the air to change the direction of flight, but it changes the chord line and aerodynamic characteristics of the wing.

JKCalhoun 2 years ago |

A few sheets of letter-size paper were like Legos for me when I was a young boy. Thanks mom for sneaking some typing paper home from your secretary job when you were raising my sister and I.

swores 2 years ago | |

Forgive me, but a small grammatical FYI: it should be "my sister and me", not "my sister and I" - because you're both the object of the verb "raising". The way to think of it is imagining what word you'd use if not including your sister, would it be "when you were raising I" or "when you were raising me" (and then insert the "my sister and" without changing your pronoun).

euroderf 2 years ago | | |

I was taught that in the subject position it would be "my sister and I" but that in the object position it would be "me and my sister", not vice-versa.

JKCalhoun 2 years ago | | |

Thank you, I like your way of remembering how to correct it (but too late for me to edit now).

twic 2 years ago | |

I once took a sheet off an A0 flip-chart at my dad's job, and tried to make the biggest paper plane i'd ever seen. It didn't work at all - it was too flimsy, and just collapsed. The paper would have needed to be thicker as well as bigger!

JKCalhoun 2 years ago | | |

Ha ha, tried a full double-sheet from a newspaper from time to time. You could "loft" it anyway.

bitwize 2 years ago |

When I was a kid (about 10, 11, or so) I read up a lot on planes and aviation because I wanted to be a pilot someday. Also logged plenty of hours on Microsoft Flight Simulator. So I knew how airfoils worked and the physics principles involved, and decided to apply that knowledge to design my own paper airplanes.

What I came up with involved construction paper taped to a bendy straw. The main wing was folded (but not creased) into an airfoil shape and attached to the long bit of the bendy straw. The short bit had paper elevators and rudder attached. By bending the straw I could set the plane to fly straight when thrown, or to turn, climb, or dive. It all worked pretty much according to plan and was one of my prouder childhood play moments. My wife laughed when I told her this and said it sounded like something her brother might do (a high compliment, as her brother is brilliant).

canadiantim 2 years ago |

I've used this with my nephew and can confirm it's very awesomesauce

mg 2 years ago |

I wish there was a competition to find out which paper plane stays in the air the longest.

It would have to be an indoor competition where a machine throws the paper planes.

I would be super curious which design wins.

shagie 2 years ago | |

Redbull haș one.

https://www.redbull.com/us-en/events/red-bull-paper-wings-wo...

https://www.cnn.com/videos/sports/2022/05/17/red-bull-paper-...

Though it doesn't look like its consistent (there was one in 2022, but nothing from May of this year).

dylan604 2 years ago | |

>It would have to be an indoor competition where a machine throws the paper planes.

I bought a paper airplane launcher as one of those gag desk toys back when working in a cubicle farm. The <$5 spent was well worth the goof off slack time it gave us for a week. For a few days, people were folding all sorts of different designs. After that, it just sat there unused and unthought about. But it was fun for the ~week

klausjensen 2 years ago | |

I am pretty sure I have seen a video about exactly that experiment... Will see if I can find it again.

andrewflnr 2 years ago | |

The contests exist, but they have a person throw the plane.

tamimio 2 years ago |

Time to build some these with aluminum sheets!!

lavezzi 2 years ago |

Was always a fan of Folding@Home.