When I was a kid, the record we cared about was flight time, not distance. We'd build planes that would gently circle and throw them straight up in the air. Distance seems to have more to do with the arm, to me.
I grew up in an 10 floor apartment building and I would just fold a few planes and throw them out the window.
Now the interesting thing about a street with tall buildings is that on some perfect days the breeze forms these smooth updrafts along the building walls.
My goal was get the paper plane to catch the updrafts and actually climb up from my 3rd floor to the top of the building. It was very rare, I must have tried 10s of different fold types but sometimes conditions would be just perfect and a particular plane would ride up in circles sometimes even clearing the top floor of the building and then glide down and land sometimes hundreds of meters away or even vanish from view.
When I ran out of planes I would grab my bicycle and go out to recover as many of them possible, come back up and repeat...
John Collins makes more than just distance paper airplanes. He has a nice TED talk about paper airplanes that I found interesting. (Not sure what I think about his opinion of Bernoulli's law though.)
You reminded me of "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (http://a.co/aCbN01n) .. what a classic.
There is a section in the book on the plane that won the duration contest. More or less a rectangular wing as I recall with just enough forward mass to give it forward movement and just enough dihedral to keep it stable.
If you liked paper airplanes as a kid and you're curious about the current state of the art for hand thrown aircraft, check out "discus launch" gliders (DLGs). These are radio-controlled models with a 1 or 1.5 meter wing span that are designed to be strong enough to be hand launched to almost 200ft but light and aerodynamic enough that they can be held aloft for a very long time by thermals.
There are some interesting design choices that have to be made between optimizing for maximum launch height and maximum glide performance.
Yep, hand-made carbon fiber parts for niche applications are unavoidably expensive. Flying one of these things is like tossing a decent spec Macbook into the air and hoping you don't get it stuck in a tree.
F3K and F3J refer to numbered sections within the competition rules[1] set by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI). FAI is the Geneva-based organization that tracks most "official" flight records for all kinds of aircraft.
F3K is the hand-launched glider class and F3J is the thermal duration soaring class.
The community has adopted these designations as a shorthand for the aircraft types, sort of like how in the U.S. people refer "401(k) accounts" or "501(c)(3) organizations."
"Collins, a former television producer and director, left his TV career behind three years ago in order to focus full-time on using his planes to educate audiences."
My dad was an aircraft engineer. When I was in 5th grade I won a paper plane contest for making a plane that flew out and came back to me (like he did in that video). That was just about the peak of my scientific achievements ️
