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How to Throw an 800 Pound Paper Airplane (Use a Helicopter)

When I was a kid, my friends and I used to spend hours inventing and constructing different paper airplane models in my basement during sleepovers. Sometimes we brought along the latest "book of templates":http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=a9_sc_1?rh=i...

When I was a kid, my friends and I used to spend hours inventing and constructing different paper airplane models in my basement during sleepovers. Sometimes we brought along the latest book of templates we'd convinced our parents to buy us during last month's Scholastic book club order, but mostly the designs were our own. We experimented with paper size, material, and thickness; held contests to see who could invent the most and least complicated planes still capable of rudimentary flight; and then staged epic dogfights on the front lawn the next day that completely undermined all the preliminary aerodynamic conclusions we had drawn the night before in my wind-less, low-ceilinged cellar playroom.

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I recall one particular optimism-inducing day when one of my parents brought home a thick roll of paper at least three feet wide that looked like it belonged on some sort of old-fashioned, room-sized receipt calculator. Our response was to make a paper airplane just about as tall as we were.

Unfortunately, after hours of carefully cutting, folding, and coloring the plane to make it as radical as a bunch of nine-year-olds could conceive of, its lackluster structural integrity ultimately forced us to admit defeat as sprinting launch after sprinting launch yielded nothing more than a crippled nose cone and approximately five feet of aggregate horizontal flight. It was the first of many times in our lives that we would learn that, despite what you hear on TV, size really does matter.

You’d have found that especially true if you were in the Arizona desert in March, when, according to the LA Times, the Pima Air & Space Museum used a helicopter to launch possibly the largest paper airplane ever constructed. The craft (aka, Arturo's Desert Eagle) was 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan and weighed 800 pounds. It was constructed as part of the museum’s Giant Paper Airplane Project to excite kids about aviation and engineering.

Despite ascending to more than half a mile, the plane was able to remain aloft for no more than 10 seconds after its release from the tow cable. During that time, however, it reached a top speed of 98 miles per hour while covering nearly one mile across the ground before tragically accordioning into the cracked and arid landscape below. (No word yet on whether North Korea has called to discuss using the design for its next missile launch attempt.) Half a mile is a hell of a drop point, but as a kid, I would have been psyched to have access to even a second-story window to toss our creations from — to say nothing of an 18th story window like the lucky (from the point of view of my adolescent avatar) Mumbai miscreant whose own homemade hang glider stars in the increasingly entrancing video below (via 3 Quarks Daily).

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The cosmic beauty of this video isn't that the airplane seems like an especially ingenious design (any wide-body glider constructed with even mild competence should be able to approach this much flight time given the heights and subsequent cross-winds involved), but the fact that anyone skipping ahead to the one-minute mark or so would probably be more likely — if they didn't know any better — to label the swooping white object a clumsy bird rather than a man-made craft.

Best of all, the predatory raptors circling overhead seem to reach the same conclusion, considering how quickly they hone in on their unsuspecting papyrus prey before snatching it out of the sky during one of their sudden ascents.

Watching these bewildered buzzards, I began wondering what else was going on in the world of paper airplanes that no one had told me about and was pleasantly surprised when a quick Google search turned yet another significant event in the field.

On a smaller dimensional scale than Arturo’s Desert Eagle but a broader geopolitical one, May 4 and 5 will mark the third-ever Red Bull Paper Wings World Final in Salzburg, Austria, which has occurred every three years since 2006. The contest sees finalists compete in three distinct areas: Longest Distance (official World Record holder: Stephen Krieger [USA, 2003] with 207' 4"), Longest Airtime (Takuo Toda [Japan, 2009] with 27.9 seconds), and Aerobatics (no world record, since winners are judged on creativity — e.g., Addison Asochak, who won the Canadian aerobatics finals by "dancing in western chaps while sending a dozen paper airplanes into the air during his one minute of competition time").

Who knew that my youthful dalliances with paper-based aviation could have led to so many exciting opportunities if I'd stuck with it? I guess that should inspire me to continue with my current pursuit: paper furniture. If I could just solve this damn paper-cut problem, I might really have something here.

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