Paper plane physics
The team had decided their best chance at beating the world record would be with an airplane design that focused on speed and minimized drag, so that the plane could fly a far distance in a short amount of time.
Gathering inspiration from various
hypersonic aircrafts, vehicles that can fly faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), specifically the
NASA X-43A, the team had come up with the winning paper aircraft design — later named “Mach 5.”
“Full-scale and paper airplanes have vast differences in their complexity, but both operate on the same fundamental principles,” said Ruble, via email. “Some of the same design methodologies can be applied to both. One of these methods was our trial-and-error design process. For instance, we would theorize about a fold we could change on our plane, fold it, throw it, and compare the distance to previous iterations to determine if the change was beneficial.”
To find the best technique when it came to throwing the paper airplane, the team ran various simulations and analyzed slow-motion videos of their previous throws.
“We found the optimal angle is about 40 degrees off the ground. Once you’re aiming that high, you throw as hard as possible. That gives us our best distance,” Jensen said in the statement. “It took simulations to figure that out. I didn’t think we could get useful data from a simulation on a paper airplane. Turns out, we could.”
Even down to the paper, which the team had decided that A4 (slightly longer than typical letter sized paper) was the best for manipulating and folding into the winning airplane. With these meticulously thought-out design choices, and careful attention to the numerous rules and guidelines set forth by the Guinness World Record Team, the three were set to break a record.
On its record-breaking distance flight the plane was in the air for roughly six seconds. The Guinness paper plane record for duration of flight
is currently 29.2 seconds.
“The design objectives for an air-time record would be vastly different from the low-drag version we built for the longest-distance record,” Ruble said via email. “Increasing the wingspan and decreasing the aspect ratio would be the first steps in producing this type of plane.”
Paper airplane aside, Ruble added that this tedious method of back-and-forth trials served as a testament to the importance of rigorous prototyping in the real world.
