My goal was get the paper plane to catch the updrafts and actually climb up from my 3rd floor to the top of the building. It was very rare, I must have tried 10s of different fold types but sometimes conditions would be just perfect and a particular plane would ride up in circles sometimes even clearing the top floor of the building and then glide down and land sometimes hundreds of meters away or even vanish from view.
When I ran out of planes I would grab my bicycle and go out to recover as many of them possible, come back up and repeat...
...sweet times =)
There is a section in the book on the plane that won the duration contest. More or less a rectangular wing as I recall with just enough forward mass to give it forward movement and just enough dihedral to keep it stable.
Edit: found a page where the first image is of that record setting duration flight: http://www.codex99.com/design/the-paper-airplane-book.html
There are some interesting design choices that have to be made between optimizing for maximum launch height and maximum glide performance.
Here's a video showing a recent model available in kit form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD0VXi_DBMM
Get a load of those prices. :-)
Also, I love how the minimalism even extends to the domain name.
F3K and F3J refer to numbered sections within the competition rules[1] set by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI). FAI is the Geneva-based organization that tracks most "official" flight records for all kinds of aircraft. F3K is the hand-launched glider class and F3J is the thermal duration soaring class.
[1] https://www.fai.org/sites/default/files/documents/sc4_vol_f3...
The community has adopted these designations as a shorthand for the aircraft types, sort of like how in the U.S. people refer "401(k) accounts" or "501(c)(3) organizations."
I wounder if he has some sort of media training.
"Collins, a former television producer and director, left his TV career behind three years ago in order to focus full-time on using his planes to educate audiences."
(Search for penny plane plans )
