CROWN POINT, Ind., - Dillon Ruble and Garrett Jensen, both engineers at Boeing, broke a record in December that had only a little to do with their day jobs: They broke the record for farthest flight by a paper aircraft, sending a sheet of paper 88.318 meters, or almost 290 feet, Erik Shilling reports for Jalopnik. Continue reading original article.
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
2 March 2023 - Aerospace engineers are quite adept at overcoming obstacles in achieving breakthroughs, but more often than not, what they're working on is aided by jets, propellers, or boosters. The Boeing engineers looked to hypersonics for inspiration as they looked to - and did - take down the paper airplane world record late last year in Crown Point, Indiana. They used their aerospace know-how alongside some help from technology to achieve their feat.
The pair tossed their aircraft 88 meters, a full 11 meters further than the previous record holders who hailed from Malaysia and South Korea and hit their mark of 77 meters in April 2022.
Ruble and Jensen, like many kids, grew up folding paper airplanes. But this aircraft took around 20 minutes to fold and the pair used technology to figure out the optimal angle - 40 degrees, give or take - to break the record.
"Once you’re aiming that high, you throw as hard as possible. That gives us our best distance,” Jensen said. “It took simulations to figure that out. I didn’t think we could get useful data from a simulation on a paper airplane. Turns out, we could.”
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Jamie Whitney, Associate Editor
Military + Aerospace Electronics
