"THEY SAY WHEN YOU MEET THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE, TIME STOPS, AND THAT’S TRUE.”
–BIG FISH from plenty of fish fame
"Relationships are funny. You have to constantly fall in love and challenge each other."
–Justin Timberlake, Glamour
“It was not a convenient time for me to fall in love with him–and it was not a convenient time for him to fall in love with me. One morning, about four o'clock, I was driving my car just about as fast as I could. I thought, 'Why am I out on the highway this time of night?' I was miserable, and it all came to me: 'I'm falling in love with somebody I have no right to fall in love with. I can't fall in love with this man, but it's just like a ring of fire.”
–June Carter Cash about Johnny Cash
How
to Make the World’s Best Paper Airplane
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Take a normal piece of paper, fold it following a few basic instructions, and you’ll end up
with a paper airplane. With only a little bit of practice, even the
most amateur paper aviator can propel the resulting creation five to ten
feet forward, and maybe even get a few seconds of glide time out of it.
It’s cheap, easy, and reusable (well, for a few dozen flights, at least).
John Collins, though, wants to do better.
Collins, by day, was a producer at a San Francisco-area
television station. But he’s best known for his hobby, which has earned
him the nickname (and the corresponding website URL) The Paper
Airplane Guy. In 2008 or 2009, Collins — who was already interested in
paper airplanes and the art of origami — became fascinated with building
the world’s farthest-flying paper airplane. He began studying
aerodynamics and related topics for three years as he tested design after
design.
The result of Collins’ obsession: Suzanne. That’s what he
named his most successful paper airplane design, seen below.
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Suzanne, Collins was sure, could break the record — 207
feet, four inches — but not with Collins’ arm powering it forward. He
needed someone with more arm strength and better throwing mechanics, so
he began recruiting potential partners. One of his colleagues at the TV
station he worked at knew a guy named Joe Ayoob. Ayoob, just a few years
earlier, was the starting quarterback for the University of California,
Berkeley and had played a few years of pro football in the Arena league.
Ayoob was the archetypical paper airplane launcher.
In February 2012, team Collins-Ayoob made their attempt at
the record at an airplane hangar (for real airplanes) at McClellan Air
Force Base outside Sacramento, California. Ayoob made ten official throws
(and, he told ESPN, probably another 40
unofficial throws that day), and on throw number four Suzanne flew 226
feet, 10 inches — a record by nearly twenty feet. Here’s a video of the
world-record throw.
Why does Suzanne work so well? The wide-winged rectangular
planes that virtually anyone can make are, like gliders — it doesn’t
matter much how hard you throw them, as they float slowly forward
(hopefully) regardless. To get more distance, most competitive plane
throwers use tightly-designed, triangular planes which, Collins told Mental Floss, are “basically
sticks with fins. Those planes operate as darts, flying through the air
as if a ballistic missile. Suzanne is a combination of the two, and as
Collins notes, the first of its kind. (If you want more details on the
technical specs, Collins gave a pretty in-depth interview to Popular
Mechanics, which you can find here.)
You can try and make one yourself if you’d like, too. Here’s a video introducing the build
order (but it is incomplete) and Collins has a book out, available here, which details every step. A few words
of warning, though: you’ll need some tools (most of which you can find
around the house) and, to really get the distance down, a quarterback to
throw it for you.
via Dan Lewis email
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