In 1903, two bicycle builders named Orville and Wilbur Wright took a homemade contraption to the sandy stretches of Kitty Hawk, N.C., and managed to get it up in the air. The world has been fascinated by airplanes ever since.
Of course, the fascination with airthings has been around much longer than that. The Chinese were flying paper kites some 2,000 years ago. Hot-air balloons appeared in the late 1700s; the earliest ones were made of paper and cloth.
So, the question arises: When did paper airplanes come on the scene?
When the first Egyptian scribe threw a piece of papyrus into the trash heap, was he actually flying an "airplane"?
Or, do paper missiles of any kind not count until there were actual planes to name them after? Were paper models used, as some historians speculate, by people who were trying to design flying machines?
These are questions that intrigue Ken Blackburn, an aeronautical engineer with Boeing, who has been fascinated with paper airplanes for most of his life.
The earliest reference he has been able to come up with for paper airplanes is around 1908-09, supplied by a man named Ian Leonard of Great Britain. Leonard has collected paper models of dirigibles dated from 1902-03, and he has some early French paper planes from 1908. Leonard also cites a book, "Model Gliders," published in 1909, which had three cutout things to fly — a butterfly, a swallow and a model of the Wright Flyer.
A man named Wallis Rigby began making and selling paper airplanes in the 1930s, and in the 1940s designed a series of Wheaties Flyers that were included in General Mills cornflakes boxes.
"Jack Northrop used paper airplanes in the 1930s to help in his ideas for flying wing airplanes," said Blackburn. "In a sense, those paper airplanes helped shaped a corporation and lead to the B-2 stealth bomber. I've had e-mails from people who remembered making paper planes 60, 80 years ago. Apparently they were common then, so paper airplanes could likely have even inspired the Wright Brothers."
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All Blackburn knows for sure is that his own passion for paper planes started when he was young. "I remember making them in first grade and Cub Scouts. I started with the basic pointed-nose plane, and as I learned more, I began to experiment with other shapes," he said during a telephone interview from his home in St. Louis.
All that experimenting has led Blackburn to the top of the field; he currently holds the Guinness World Record for time aloft for a paper airplane — an amazing 27.60 seconds.
That may not sound like much, he said, until you consider that 8-10 seconds in the air is enough to win most paper-airplane contests.
Blackburn has actually set the record several times. His first record-breaking time was 16.89 seconds, set in 1983. He bested that in 1987 with a flight time of 17.20 seconds, and again in 1994 with a time of 18.8 seconds. "In January 1998 I opened the Guinness Book of World Records and had a rude shock. Two British men had wrested the record from me with a flight of 20.90 seconds."
Determined to regain the title, Blackburn not only perfected his design, which is actually a square-box plan rather than the typical pointed-dart style, he also began working with an athletic trainer to help increase his throwing speed. And on Oct. 8, 1998, in the Georgia Dome, he took back the record.
Records are also given for distance flown (the current record is 193 feet), and many airplane contests focus on distance. They may also require stunts or flying close to a target.
When it comes to making paper airplanes, there are no secrets, said Blackburn. "You have to apply the basics of aviation."
A very simple experiment can help you see that, said Blackburn. Fold one piece of paper into a plane shape, and wad another piece into a ball. "The wadded-up paper has nothing to hold it in the air, so it quickly drops to the ground, while the plane will fly gracefully through the air."
That's not to say that only one shape or size will work. Blackburn and his friend, Jeff Lammers, have published a number of books containing designs for everything from his basic square plane to things called "The Valkyrie," "The Condor" and "The Hammerhead," (all of which are folded from a flat sheet of paper into various configurations) to paper models of famous aircraft, such as "The Red Baron's Fokker Dr.1 Triplane" and Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis." They even published a pocket book of miniature designs.
You have to design a paper airplane like any other plane, said Warren Phillips, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Utah State University. There's more to it than just folding and throwing, he said. "But it can be a fun way to learn some science."
Basically, when you're talking about paper airplanes, you're talking about gliders. "And it's a very complex science. They've been working on it for more than a hundred years."
Two important principles are involved, Phillips said. One is the lift-to-drag ratio and the other is stability.
Lift is what keeps the plane in the air. It involves the air rushing over the top of the wings and pushing up from below. Drag is the air pushing against the plane as it flies through the air, slowing it down.
You want an aerodynamic shape, said Phillips. "It should be sleek, 'clean' looking, with no sharp or square trailing edges. A sports car has less drag than a semi-truck, for example. A canoe has less drag than a motor boat."
If you want to get technical, he added, there are two kinds of drag — parasitic drag, which has to do with shape and the flow of air that shape creates, and induced drag, which results from the production of lift.
The other important thing is stability. "An airplane won't go anywhere if it is unstable." A plane must have a center of gravity that is slightly forward from the aerodynamic center.
The tricky part comes because things you might do to increase the stability of a plane could also increase drag. Induced drag can be lessened by increasing the aspect ratio (the wing span divided by the wing chord), but to do that you need stronger materials. Think of the long, narrow wings of a sailplane; such aircraft have low induced drag but require high-strength materials for construction.
"The primary strength from a paper airplane comes from the way it is folded," Phillips said. "If you fold the paper to make it stronger, you could be increasing parasitic drag. The trick of designing all airplanes is the trade-off between structural strength and a high lift-to-drag ratio."
Technology has brought a lot of changes in both design and materials used. "Consider that the Wright Brothers' plane has a glide ratio of 8-to-1. That's how many feet it falls for every foot it moves forward. The best sail-planes today have a 60-to-1 ratio," Phillips said, "so they can fly a long way."
"There's a lot more to paper airplanes than people realize," said Blackburn.
Not only have books been written about them, but there are clubs and associations all over the world. One of the largest is the Paper Aircraft Association, based in England and founded by Andy Chipling in 1989.
Engineering and aeronautic schools often hold design competitions, and even NASA has been involved with them. In 1992, for example, ex-astronauts helped some Virginia students build a paper plane with a wingspan of 30 feet, 6 inches.
And who knows where playing around with paper planes might lead you, said Blackburn. "It led to my career as an aeronautical engineer. I've been with Boeing for 18 years now. I've been able to work on the F-18 project and more recently on experimental missiles."
Blackburn likes to do presentations to school groups and Scout troops about how much fun science can be. Learning about paper planes and how they work made him want to know how other things work. You can read and study, but you can also experiment and have fun, he said. "You can learn anything you want."
E-mail: carma@desnews.com