Brit school claims highest paper plane launch crown It's official: El Reg has finally relinquished its highest-altitude paper plane launch Guinness World Record, almost five years since the Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) Vulture 1 triumphantly swooped to earth from 27,310m. On 24 June, The Science Club of Ipswich's Kesgrave High School, led by science teacher Dave …
Well done to The Science Club of Ipwich's Kesgrave High School, (but I have to note that the absence of a pilot / Playmonaut in the paper plane was a slight disappointment. That may mean that you still hold the crown for highest release of a paper aeroplane insto space with a plastic figure and successful recovery after all.)
It strikes me that it would have been quicker to set up an explosives factory and get the correct licences in Spain than chase FAA regulatory approval to allow you to import and fly a rocket powered 'drone' aircraft in US airspace, especially one that can be programmed from outside of the US.
They're probably trying to prove it's some nefarious terrorist plot.
What I'm now waiting for is for the license to be permanently declined, and the plane prevented from being exported from the US without a "dual use, foreign defence article" ITAR export license, which will be similarly denied.
It would actually have been quicker, and only marginally more expensive, to terraform Mars and use that for the launch.
Mind you, once we got up to the Red Planet there would no doubt be a joint panel of Spanish functionaries and FAA jobsworths demanding application forms in triplicate.
Its very difficult to make anything fly in a straight line without some sort of autopilot because even tiny wing warps mean that a gliding model will fly in a more or less constant circle. The centre of this circular flight path drifts with the wind, so the distance a balloon-dropped glider lands from its launch point is entirely due to the direction and speed of the wind drift it meets on the way up under the balloon and then, after release, as it glides down.
Just got out a piece of A4 in order to remember how it is done. Strange to say a mate at Primary School showed me this one back in Mumble 60 something.
Errr..
1) Fold in half length ways.
2) Fold 'front' to make a right angled triangle.
3) Open up and fold over front to vertex of triangle.
4) Fold back in half and tear off square bit form open edge of triangle.
5) Open up and re-fold other corners of previous triangle to centre to create pointy bit.
6) Re-fold previous triangle so torn corners are foremost.
7) Fold torn corners to centre in a triangular manner.
8) Fold pointy bit between torn corners now at centre.
9) Reverse fold length ways so pointy bit holds rest in place.
9) Fold Wings.
10) Extend wings.
....
http://i.imgur.com/RsrkmLz.jpg
....
11) Go Fly
Erm E&OE
"'Torn'? That's cheating!"
You damn Origami Purist. You have destroyed my Boy Hood. I shall now have to spend the next five minutes getting over the last Fifty years of my life of failure.
You may assume that if this message has not been edited within the next 10 minutes I have overcome the trauma you have thrown at me.
Otherwise please take your issues with Staples' Glue and Tape up with them.
http://www.staples.co.uk/
"Very technical, in the RN we used to call this part of a ship "the pointy end", which is a more technically correct terminology :-)"
Unfortunately you have to get a pointy bit before proceeding to the final, different, pointy end. At least I think it works that way. I'll be buggered if I could follow my own instructions but I would be cheating if I did because I, think I, know what I was blithering on about.
Given you are/were RN you are excused because you have no planes to launch off your pointy bits.
Remind me to bite my tongue.
Bloody hell, where does the time go...?
Maybe it's time for the SPB to, like the ESA's a couple of months back, go visit the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, the guys who run, among other boffinish things, the DCF77 time signal. They may have an answer to that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
