Giant Paper Airplane Takes (Brief) Flight Over Arizona

The L.A. Times reports that 12-year-old Arturo Valdenegro's winning entry in a paper-airplane contest got upscaled to slightly larger dimensions, courtesy of Pima Air & Space Museum's Giant Paper Airplane Project, and flown, via helicopter assistance, in the Arizona desert. Slightly larger, in this case, means the plane based on Valdenegro's designs "was 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan and weighed in at a whopping 800 pounds," constructed of a tough, corrugated material called falcon board. Unfortunately, the tow didn't take the plane as high as planned (only 2,703 feet, instead of four or five thousand) so the resulting flight was brief and destructive — which doesn't make the accompanying launch video any less fun to watch, though I wish it showed more of the flight, including its end. (I tend to always make the same kind of acrobatic glider; do you have any good paper-airplane hints?)

Comments

What's missing

[buchner.johannes]

is an equally upscaled trebuchet.

Best paper plane, IMO

[mark-t]

It took me a few minutes of searching for me to find, since I did not know the name for this plane (or even if it had one), but here are some folding directions for what I consider to be the best paper plane ever: http://www.ncgraphicarts.com/ryan/other/eagleins.gif. When I was a kid, I had employed this paper design in a classroom competition, while almost everybody else was making the standard dart, I used this glider design, and mine was one of the few that cleared the entire length of the gymnasium (and would have kept on going right onto the stage at the end of the gym if the curtain had not been shut). I'm afraid I don't know what the dimensions of my school gym were, but I imagine they were typical for an elementary school.