https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/mystic
Started watching the video not planning on actually making it, saw that it is done with A4 paper and grabbed a random sheet at my desk to follow along. The pocket felt like a nice "a-ha!" moment. As someone who only knew the "naive" way to make paper airplanes from A4 paper, this is the best performing and prettiest paper airplane I've made in my life! It almost feels like it's not real how smoothly it stays straight in the air compared to all my paper airplanes in childhood.
Edit: Tried making the flapping wings AeroDactyl but it didn't work out :( wasn't aerodynamic and didn't flap its wings just went straight to the ground
Edit 2: Tried making the Jetstream (another 1 minute plane) and it came out well! Mine is INCREDIBLY asymmetrical and still flies better than any other plane I've made other than the Mystic!
Edit 3: Tried making the Advanced Elanus and I made it! But it's a little shoddy and much tougher for sure. Looks cool but it doesn't glide anywhere near as good as in the video (I guess you really need to perfect it.)
Final edit: My planes :) https://i.imgur.com/xnMdzJv.jpeg
> I messed with tons of "world record distance" designs as a kid
It turned out that they wanted paper planes that conformed to their idea of a paper plane, not paper-based engineering marvels.
Apparently, that design is called "two loops".
A similar anecdote. There was once a bridge-building competition, with provided materials, and scores for it bearing different weight toy cars, for height and for length. Nowhere was it said the bridge had to bear any of the cars. Our group’s 15-metre long roll of tape bridge with four-pop-stick-A-frame supports, which scored three times as much as the next (… and we could have doubled its length), was unceremoniously disqualified for unspecified grounds, as I had expected. I pressed for a few days for the grounds (even suggesting the couple of not-unreasonable grounds I had thought of, such as that our team had schismed into two over the creative direction), but was not given them.
The unwritten rules about spirit can be applied capriciously.
I think ours was still the most popular bridge. And honestly one of the more realistic, just scaled for much smaller vehicles, a consistent 1:500 where most were an inconsistent 1:25 to 1:50. They were really good supports.
Kids' Shenanigans by Klutz?
Edit: https://a.co/d/09I0VuLM this was one of the books. No affiliate link. ISBN-13 is 978-0761143833
Edit 2: it was this one! https://www.booktopia.com.au/worlds-greatest-paper-airplane-...
I've been making this version since I was a kid, but never folded the nose.
Is it to help keep the spine together?
I haven't made a plane in a long time, so I don't have much frame of reference.
But for comparison I tried making another one, a "naive" plane the way I used to, and it just "reverse nosedived" straight into the ceiling.
For half of the video I was thinking this was the airplane I learned to do in my childhood but later on I saw the nice final tweaks, its very nice given the time you put.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ocKG4Ymm5o
I guess the written instructions are included in the ebook sold on the same website.
Watch the video once and follow along, you'll know how to do it.
Born on January 12, 1917 in Munich, Felix emigrated from Germany in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, and settled with part of his family in his mother's native Florence; after obtaining his Italian high-school degree ("licenza liceale") he went on to study engineering at the Istituto Politecnico in Milan, but when the Fascists' anti-semitic laws of 1938 prohibited Jews from enrolling in public schools and universities, he settled in Paris, again with part of his family. At the outbreak of WWII in September 1939, Felix was in Switzerland and a return to France was impossible; in 1940 he emigrated to Chile before finally settling in Berkeley to join his brother Bernard in 1941, and enrolling in the engineering school of the University of California. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the US Army and became one of "The Ritchie Boys" - GIs of German origin who spoke German natively and were trained in Military Intelligence at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. He was discharged with the rank of Master Sergeant and returned to the University of California to study architecture; after having obtained his MA he became assistant to Eric Mendelsohn, the renowned architect who had recently joined Berkeley's Architecture Department.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/felix-r...
We had the original book when I was a kid. My wife gave me a copy (off of AbeBooks or somewhere) a few years ago and I was a bit overcome with emotion at seeing it again.
I occasionally add a comment when we do this, in the hope that people will learn about it and send us nominations! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Unfortunately needs a bit of tape usually for most of the models. But great book.
A friend of mine his uncle bought him a copy. We proceeded to make all of them. Came across a funny thing if you clip a clothspin on the tip of the one the cover it goes wildly further than it should. Even without it goes pretty far.
Thanks for reminding me of it
Please comment with any feedback you have regarding the site. I hope to improve its existing features and to add additional features in the future.
His box of kept planes: https://imgur.com/a/2HW8tC2
The reappearing sheet asking me to subscribe to some newsletter is incredibly annoying. And it seems that it sometimes refreshes the website when I close it?
Who of the first time visitors would even want to subscribe to such a thing before seeing pretty much any content? Does it have a reasonable conversion?
The planes seem cool though!
Thanks!
One summer, I had brought a book on how to make different paper airplanes. My grandmother had this huge crate of dot matrix printer paper [1] that I was given freedom to use to my heart's content.
I made hundreds of planes, of varying quality. I even did quasi-scientific tests to see which ones would fly farther, and I used a rubber band extended to the same length each time to try and ensure I was applying roughly the same amount of force in each launch.
I look back at that time pretty fondly. It was the only time in my life that I actually had fun visiting my grandmother's house.
[1] Even at the time this was somewhat outdated; she had a normal inkjet printer at the time so the paper was basically useless as printer paper.
My son is now 11 and he still folds, has mastered advanced origami skills, and also has organised four yearly paper aeroplane competitions. All down to Kyle Boyer and his Foldable Flight channel.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you Kyle!
This is Kyle! Thanks for your kind words! I just discovered this website because my website (Foldable Flight) has been getting an insane amount of traffic today because of this post. I hope you and your son continue to love paper airplanes and explore creativity together :-)
I'd go to the top floor, take a bunch of paper from the printer room and fold planes, and send them out into the central space. Go back, tweak the design or try something new, launch again.
Don't think I came up with any good designs, but I had a lot of fun trying various ideas.
21.jul.2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36784032 25 comments
26.may.2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087442 76 comments
18.jul.2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134691 96 comments
06.dec.2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466325 8 comments
16.jun.2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23545860 8 comments
18.oct.2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755 206 comments
They both have adblockers enabled: no clue if that is the root cause though.
Obviously the book was translated from US.
I don't remember how bad it was in practice but I remember it made me sad.
(It's okay, I learned immediately how to rectify, uh, squarify, the situation.)
And as I mentioned below - maybe exactly this was in the way from making the best paper plane ever, that could fly all the way to my neighbour? What did I know?
My mom was a secretary and so brought home typing paper for me.
When I was older, dumpster diving netted me 4 or 5 reams of typing paper (with a letterhead on one side—oh well).
Interestingly, paper A4 wide (210mm?) by letter tall (11") is a thing in the TeX community.
That a4 x 11" document size prints correctly on A4 or letter without scaling or cropping (the margins just change)
My experience is that it is quite difficult to cut the sheet precisely enough if you just use a normal pair of scissors.
The instructions were just there and I was certain it was the best plane ever if I just had the right paper format. And that they failed had nothing to do with my folding skills.
I see a number of folks questioning whether this is AI slop. I can personally attest to Kyle's work being very real. He has been doing this for many years. I've attended a few of his face-to-face folding lessons and had a lot of fun folding and flying these planes.
Fun stuff :)
EDIT: this is the one for me https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-greatest-paper-airpla...
A formative experience was losing the plane toss to a jock who entered only in that event, folded a few 'standard' airplanes, and fired off a few practice shots modeling the official throwing conditions (fixed elbow on a bench at kneeling height) before taking first place with a fresh plane.
Mostly I'm just curious, how well does the standard crappy paper airplane fly, which every kid makes in school, how well does it fly relative to some of these world record winners? (Some of which have a lot more folds and measuring and tape than I was expecting!)
Here's the revised and expanded edition: https://www.amazon.com/World-Record-Paper-Airplane-Airplanes...
And here's the original if you want a hit of nostalgia: https://paperace.com/ken-blackburn-four-times-world-record-h...
If you're interested the link to the other related site has more step by step instructions: https://www.foldnfly.com/#/1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-1
It flew so long in the same spot that Japanese tourists stopped and took pictures of it.
They really do take pictures of anything and everything hahah
- Can't sort the airplanes
- Instructions are video only
I guess those cards must still exist but it has been ages since I have read a real magazine. I had a couple of dumb subscriptions in college but do not think I have ever had any since. Should consider it for our kids and to get me off my phone.
I folded the Vanguard (https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/vanguard), can attest that it’s relatively easy, looks great (kiddo loves it) and flies better than any plane I have previously folded.
The person who got the farthest got some extra prize. I wish I'd know about this resource then!
So basically just buy the $35 worth of books and templates they're selling if you actually want to do this instead of playing and pausing a YT video a hundred times to get through this.
I think I'll fire up Publisher '97 and relive my paper plane memories.
I used to spend a lot of time with origami books. They didn't have videos. You could consume the information as quickly as you wanted.
Unless, of course, you couldn't do that because the instructions were completely inscrutable. That happened a lot. More the rule than the exception, really.
Videos solve so many problems in this context. They would have saved me hours of confusion. Why would you complain that the free instructions are superior to the instructions you can pay for?
Wish every business was this simple.
There was a good design floating around (locally?) called a Pasquali [1]. In the couple of hours before the contest. I folded about a dozen of the design and tested them. The individual plane that flew best is the one that I flew in the contest.
(If you happen to know the UCLA campus, the plane was launched from the top of Boelter Hall -- about 3 floors up from memory. It flew all the way across the Engineering Quad to the raised courtyard between the Geology and Chemistry buildings.)
[1] If anybody here happens to know of this design, I've forgotten all of the details other than the name. I'd love to recover it! Sadly, the actual paper airplane is long lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu5zrlh6sCo&t=23s
Marvelous.
- Every action takes 3-10 seconds, including pressing on regular ass links
- There's a big yellow button "Fold planes" on main page that redirects you to the main page?
- Login is a blue text on blue background
- You have to click on the image of the plane to get to it's page, clicking on text doesn't work (small thing, but very unintuitive)
Is there something wrong with my browser, or it's a website?
What would it require for the mail popup to be remembered on refresh so you don't have to keep clicking off of it? I'd be happy to update that feature.
I’ve lost all respect for people who do shit like this.
Because they always fold under pressure.
The Greatest Paper Airplanes: https://archive.org/details/PAPERAIR