Hi, everyone. I'm Gus Posey. I'm the STEAM lead here at Wings Over the Rockies Air
and Space Museum. Today, I'm going to show you a little bit of a unique paper airplane.
Something you might not have seen before. It's something a little bit
more creative, but also something that uses an interesting aerodynamic
principle that I hope you're thinking about. Once again, we're going to need
just a basic piece of paper here. You can use an 8.5 by 11 sheet or
an A4 piece of paper, if you're in a different part of the world. But just a
nice, rectangular piece of paper and possibly a tool for flattening. I like to
use a marker, but whatever you have handy that can give you a nice clean, crisp edge.
Now, in this example, I'm going to start with the paper and a little bit of a
different shape. I'm going to put the long edge down here towards me with the
short edge of the paper on to the side. Now, whenever you're ready to begin, I'm
just going to grab the corner down here at the very bottom, and I'm going to grab
that corner and fold it up and over, going past the edge. Going past the edge
and kind of scooting until right here, I have a 90-degree angle.
This size is the same size as this, and this is the same size as this. So we're
talking about parallel lines here and a nice right angle right here in this
corner. And, once again, I'll get this nice and flat, and, hopefully, we can see that
that's pretty close, right here has a nice right angle. Now, once you've got this
shape right here, you've already got most of your plane built, believe it or not.
But we're going to do a couple more things just to make sure it flies. And we'll
start to talk about that interesting aerodynamic principle. Down here at the
bottom edge of the page, I'm going to grab this and fold it twice. Now, it's
important that you notice that, when I'm done folding the second time, I'm past
the edges of the wing by about an inch. Let me show you what I mean. On the first
fold, I'm just folding upwards about half an inch, maybe a couple centimeters, going
nice and smooth all the way across and maybe using my tool just to make sure
I've got a nice crease there. But, as you can see, I haven't made it past the edge
here, and I haven't made it past the edge here. So I need to fold it twice to make
sure that happens. On the second fold, I might go a little bit higher just to make
sure that, when I'm done folding, I've got a tab over here, and I've got a
tab over here. Now once you have a shape like this, you're ready for the super
crazy part, so be ready for this, and hopefully, you've got a table kind of like
mine. I'm going to grab this by the tabs and, if you can see this, I'm just holding the
tabs here and here firmly and turning them face down, right
on the corner of the table. This tab goes straight down. This one goes straight
across: straight down, straight across. And you can imagine, you can do this quite a
few times, but you're just looking for this. It's a little bit curved, it's very
flat and a little bit bumpy. It has these little marks across at these
crenellations. But those are going to help it fly too. A nice flat surface with
these little bumpy areas are going to help this work as a wing. Now, if you've seen a
wing like this, you might have seen some wings with winglets, those positions on
the wings where the vertical surfaces tilt up a little bit. Airlines use those
on planes like the 787 to reduce drag, save gas, save money, etc. We can do that
today, as well. We can raise these up and up and up, and, in fact, I'm going to raise
them all the way to the point where this one slides right inside of here just
like this. This is called an annular wing, also called a ring wing. But, as you can
see, it's just a round shape. And the wing section goes all the way around, so the
drag reduction comes all the way down to essentially zero back here at the
trailing edge of the wing. Now, this one's a little bit easy to fold. Hopefully you
saw that, and a little bit tricky to launch. I'll give you some specific tips
on how to get that flying here in just a minute.
Alright, now that you've folded your ring wing,
I'm going to need a little bit of space to test it. Pretty easy to
fold, but a little bit tricky to launch. I recommend this method, but you're
welcome to try anything that works. Take two fingers, put them inside the ring on
the triangles, just like this, so your thumb is on the outside. And then, if I
want to fly this direction, I'm going to stick my arm the opposite direction,
keeping it straight at the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist. And then, I'm just
going to bring it to my head. When I get to my head, I'm just going to let go.
Thanks for watching, everyone. Join me next time for more tutorials.
Thanks very much for watching. You know, we've got a lot of really great artifacts in this
museum, and we can hardly wait until the time comes when we can open our doors
again, and you can come and see them in person. Until that time, we're going to be
working very hard to bring you new content, new demonstrations, new workshops,
all kinds of wonderful things for you to watch on video. We're really dedicated to
our mission of educating and inspiring people of all ages about the aerospace
endeavors of the past, present and future. If you like what you've been seeing, and,
if you want to support our museum, please follow the link below and make a
donation, and thank you, thank you very much.