By comparison the wings of a four passenger airplane have a Reynolds Numbers of up to about 6,000,000. Also, remember the transition from laminar to turbulent? That happens at a Reynolds number of no less than about 10,000, so the first ½ to ¼ of the flow over a paper airplane's wing is laminar. Since the Reynolds Number is much less than for full sized airplanes, this means viscosity is much more dominant, resulting in more drag, and more difficulty in creating lift. Learn how to make paper airplanes with these easy instructions. Select the plane you want and get ready for takeoff. Be careful with the ones that are pointy, they can hurt! Most planes are best indoors, but some will surpise you outdoors. On that basis, I was looking forward to folding some of the paper airplanes in this book with my youngest son and I thought it would be a fun thing for us to do together. If I’m honest I was a bit excited myself too – who doesn’t love a good paper plane?

I currently live with my wife and two dogs in Fort Walton Beach, FL where I work as an aeronautical engineer for the Air Force doing research on all sorts of air vehicles. Previously I worked for Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis on jet fighters and other military vehicles. Fold the top corners in so they meet at the middle. There should be a small triangle tail hanging out beneath these folds. A collection of easy-to-fold paper airplane designs and innovative theories of flight, including the author’s Guinness World Record-breaking airplane. Features 16 tear-out model planes. Fold the top two corners down so they meet the center crease. This is the classic way to start a paper airplane, and probably what you first learned as a kid.

Success!

Written and designed for younger paper pilots, it has simpler planes with brighter, bolder graphics; games, activities, and fun aviation facts (the "A=Alpha, B=Bravo" pilots' alphabet, for example); and everything kids need to fold and fly. They will learn how to design their own planes, do stunts, and build a 3-D airport with stuff found around the house, and they'll discover that the largest aircraft ever flown wasn't a plane at all. There are 16 models and 76 full-color planes in all, a full-color poster of an airport, a pilot's license and flight log, and a field guide to common aircraft. A collection of easy-to-fold paper airplane designs and innovative theories of flight, including the author’s Guinness World Record-breaking airplane.

M.M. O'Meara and T.J.Mueller, "Experimental Determination of the Laminar Separation Bubble Characteristics of an Airfoil at Low Reynolds Numbers", AIAA-86-1065, May 1986

How did we get on?

Paper airplanes are very helpful when you want to illustrate air traffic control guidelines. There was a time when people used the paper airplane to explain and discuss the fundamental parts of real aircraft. People of a certain age may recall buying those fancy "White Wings" in the store made from several sheets of squeezed chipboard paper, and these cutout versions are still paper airplanes too. How to Make a Paper Airplane? Stability means the plane, if disturbed, will return to its original state. For pitch stability it means the plane will seek a single airspeed. A plane which is unstable in pitch will either pitch up into a stall, or nose dive, but won't settle out anywhere in between. A stable airplane will tend to oscillate up and down a few times, but converge on a steady flight speed. Many typical paper airplane designs are stable, but just barely. As a plane becomes more and more stable, it wants to fly faster and faster. To counter this tendency, up elevator must be used to produce a good trim airspeed. This is why many of the classic paper airplane designs are nearly neutrally stable. Few people realize good pitch stability requires a heavy nose and some up elevator. The classic designs rely on the small inherent "up elevator" effect (positive zero lift pitching moment) resulting from the swept wing, and possibly the airfoil shape. Thus many classic paper airplanes can be flown with no elevator adjustment. Sometimes they fly well, many times they don't, and they always have poor stability. As mentioned in section 2.2, where a paper airplane balances is called the Center of Gravity (CG), and there is a specific CG position known as the Neutral Point which provides neutral pitch stability. If the airplane has a CG ahead of this point, the plane is stable, if its behind this point its unstable. Naturally all airplanes without computer assisted flight controls need a CG ahead of their neutral point. For rectangular wings the neutral point is ¼ of the distance from the nose to the tail. For delta wings (such as the common dart paper airplane) the neutral point is ½ of the distance from the nose to the tail. The goal for gliding flight is to descend vertically as slowly as possible. This represents the lowest rate of change of potential energy(power) which is the minimum product of drag times velocity. Generally the minimum sink rate for gliders is just above stall, and that's true for paper airplanes as well. For those interested in the details and math, finding the minimum power required involves taking the equation for powered required, differentiating with respect to velocity, and setting this equal to zero (standard calculus procedure for finding the minimum or maximum of a function. Starting with the basic parabolic drag curve;