Paper Airplane and Flight Distance

Overview

Objectives/Goals A paper airplane is a simple, yet fun and creative toy. After reading my brother's paper airplane book, I learned that there are a wide variety of paper airplane designs. While going through the different designs, I was curious to find which paper airplane design would fly farthest? I conducted a scientific experiment using 8 different designs of paper airplanes to see which design would fly farthest. My hypothesis was a plane with a wider wing span would fly farthest because a real airplane has wider wing span to fly a longer distance. Methods/Materials For my experiment, I used the 8.5 x 11 inches plain copy paper to make paper airplanes, made two original designs, and picked six designs from www.origami-kids.com. I conducted my experiment inside the gym to avoid the effects of wind. I used the electric launcher in the first part of my experiment and hand throw in the second part. I threw one type of planes ten times and measured the distance from the starting point to nose of the plane for each throw. I repeated this procedure for the rest of designs. Results My data contained outliers, so I decided to use median. This way, I could avoid influencing central tendency of my test results. Based on the median, Wide Fenix got the first place for using the electric launcher. The second was X-Glider; the third Original; the forth Mouse; the fifth FF2; the sixth X-Hunter; the seventh Fly; the eighth Needle. For the hand throw, Original got the first place. The second was Wide Fenix; the third X-Hunter; the forth Needle; the fifth Fly; the sixth X-Glider; the seventh FF2; the eighth Mouse. Conclusions/Discussion Since the results of launcher depended on the fold on the bottom of the planes, the hand throw was more reliable way to test my hypothesis. Therefore, I only use the results by hand for my conclusion.Overall, my test results did not support my hypothesis. The winner, the Original, did not have a wide wing span. The second place, Wide Fenix, did have a wide wing span, but the third and fourth place did not have a wide wing span. Therefore, a wider wing span was not a key factor for longer travel distant. For the future experiment, I will test the winner of this experiment (the Original) using different size of papers to see which paper size of papers would fly farther. This way, I can tell whether a wing span would affect a travel distance.

Competition history

• CSEF 2013 Aerodynamics/ Hydrodynamics (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0126

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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