Over a few days, we learned a lot about airplanes! At first, we learned how to fold the normal paper airplane:
Then, we experimented, making planes like:
But, none of the planes I made worked very well! =P Some even did loops in the air, which wasn’t really what I wanted, though it was interesting. Many of them just slammed into the floor, though, which was disappointing. I knew that planes were supposed to have wings, but nothing more than that, so I felt confused on why it wasn’t working. I wondered why only the normal paper airplane was staying afloat long enough.
To find out why, we explored the features of planes, including that it uses the forces of gravity (the force pulling down on the plane), lift (the force pulling up on the plane), drag (the force pulling on one side of the plane, and thrust (the force pulling on the other side of the plane. But, gliders like paper airplanes, only have three forces, since it doesn’t have thrust. Finally it made sense! The reason all those planes didn’t work was because they had too much of one force. It felt, to me, like airplanes that work were a delicate balance of all these forces, which I found really cool.
I made a paper airplane called Sailor Wing Plane, from this link:
https://www.foldnfly.com/28.html#Sailor-Wing-Plane
This is what I got:
I didn’t do the lifted tail part, since I found that it flew farther without it. Or maybe, it was too hard a step… =)
It flew farther than the normal plane, which was awesome! =)
For my future wooden airplane, I think I would want to make it sort of like the Sailor Wing Plane, having high delta wings, and good center balance. I also think I should change it a little bit, and add dihedral wings, which is more stable than a horizontal wing, since it can self-correct itself when facing things like turbulence.
So far, I found that this project is a lot of fun! =)