Paper Airplanes and How to Fold Them - Three Original* 'ePlanes' I Designed in the Nineties
Designing paper airplanes is something I've done quite a lot of, particularly in my school years where a lot of take home notes and newsletters got folded into paper airplanes.
Not that I was fanatical about it. I only really designed planes when a random piece of paper made it into my possession, and I just found trying to design a new paper airplane a more interesting challenge than making the same airplane every time.
I did, however, have three rules for creating a successful design, with my goal being to design a paper airplane that looked more like an actual airplane:
Planes must be made from one piece of standard A4 copy paper.
No cutting or tearing of the paper allowed.
The finished plane must be able to glide in a stable flight.
Some time back in the 1990s I came up with a completely original design that looked clearly like a jet, that came to be known as the 'ePlane TETMKI', when I published a website with the folding instructions of several of my designs in 2000.
That was way before online video had really found its feet (which wouldn't really happen until YouTube appeared in 2006). At the request of my Facebook followers I've made videos of the TETMKI, and two variations, that modify classic, age old staple designs into similarly styled jets.
The videos are posted below with some notes on their design. All of these are recommended for advanced pilots who know how to tweak a paper airplane design for better flight and, more importantly, have good throwing technique.
ePlane TETMKI and TETMKIa
As far as I know the fold of this design is completely original. Back when I designed it I'd never seen anything that looked like this in any of the paper airplane books I'd seen (and I'd seen a lot of them at this point).
The first version was actually the MKIa with the landing gear down but I don't think it really adds anything to the design or its ability to fly.
Today there are many paper airplane designs online that use the inside reverse fold to create that jet plane look. I'm not saying my humble little, short lived, ePlanes website from 2000 revolutionised paper airplane design, I just hadn't seen anything that looked like that prior to my site.
ePlane MOD-TETMKII
After creating the MKI I realised this classic stunt plane had the right fold structure to convert it to the jet plane look. While it still flies well, the classic plane is way more fun to fly.
My friends and I used to make this classic all the time because you can throw it straight up high, and it takes a fair while for it to glide back down.
ePlane MOD-TETMKIII
It was a no brainer to apply the same jet plane conversion to the classic dart, creating a plane that can be thrown even further than the original design.
I recently discovered that this design is a variation of the classic Concorde paper airplane design, which I had never seen prior to the year 2000 anywhere. Which is why my design has a different profile to the classic with the nose fold on mine extending only halfway down the fuselage.
Again, I'm not saying the Concorde design was derived from mine, just that maybe it's possible.
* With regard to saying 'Original' in the headline to this article, I came up with these designs on my own back in the 1990's. As mentioned I'd never seen these designs anywhere, but I'm not ruling out that it's entirely possible (and very likely) anyone could have come up with these designs. Particularly the two classic plane mods which are, two obvious, and relatively easy, folds to apply. I am fairly certain the MKI is completely my design, even if it looks similar to others in the final appearance.
The Michael Keaton Batman Trilogy on DVD. Despite its questionable CGI, troubled star, and the turmoil surrounding the DCEU's future when it was released, 2023's, The Flash does give us a new, and probably final, installment in Michael Keaton's run as Bruce Wayne/Batman. With that in mind, this holiday season, I had a real itch to spend a day binge watching what is now The Michael Keaton, Batman Trilogy . To give you some context, I own every Batman movie (except Pattinson's The Batman ) on DVD, and every DCEU movie up to The Flash. The ones I don't own are only missing because I haven't gotten around to buying them, and they're likely still available on a streaming service I'm subscribed to. I've had Keaton's first two Batman movies in my collection for the best part of two decades but I can count on one hand how many times I've watched each. The last time was more than a decade ago. Before I watched them recently, if you'd have asked...
TET's Cats AI generated art trained on my own art style. Way back in the early 2000's I started painting stylized cat artworks to illustrate some cat themed poems I'd written, that I exhibited and sold online in an exhibition titled 'Sleeping Cats' in 2004. You can see all these early works in my Flickr Album . Many are also available to buy as prints in my RedBubble Store . Leading on from that I began selling my paintings on ebay where the cat themed works were almost guaranteed to sell over any other subject I painted. As a result I became some what known for my cat art to the point where people would commission me to create images of their own pet cats in my cartoony style. Flash forward a decade (almost two at this point) and I haven't painted any cat themed art in years. To be honest I haven't done any traditional painting at all in years. In the last couple of years AI image generators have really caught my attention. Specifically that they are able t...
Tesla Optimus Prototype One, Development Platform. September 30th finally rolled around along with Tesla A.I. day and the unveiling of not one but two Tesla Optimus Robot prototypes. Which was quite a bonus since we hadn't heard anything much about these robots when I wrote about them in July of 2022. Before revealing the first prototype, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, made a point of managing everyone's expectations, just in case anyone was thinking they were about to see anything close to the actual human concept 'robot' we saw last year. I honestly don't think anyone was expecting that. Prototype One - Development Platform The prototype that walked out on stage, for the very first time without ever being tethered to anything (apparently), was still incredibly impressive despite not being streamlined and highly refined in its capability. It walked quite well - eerily similar to the first generation robots in the 2004, Will Smith movie, iRobot , and even did a bit of a dan...
Julie Bishop, Member of Parliament of Australia during the Session "Opening Plenary: Globalization 4.0" at the World Economic Forum, Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils 2018. Copyright by World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell Did you know that you can join The World Economic Forum ? True. You don't have to be a billionaire, CEO of a corporation, or even a high level member of your government. You can sign up for free on the WEF website and be kept up to date with what this mega evil, mustache twirling, elite organization is doing. If you want to keep an even closer eye, and maybe even have some input into what the WEF is doing in your part of the world, they have some very affordable paid subscriptions (which you can even trial, free for 30 days - imagine... a whole month free of keeping your beady little eye on this very shady organization that wants to control what toilet paper you buy... probably? #notsponsored). While much of the high level partner/mem...
I love the character of Indiana Jones played by Harrison Ford. Recently I bought a DVD box set of all four Indiana Jones movies so I could finally have them in my film collection. With Indiana Jones 5 ramping up production, and set to be released in 2021 (after being pushed back from 2020) it seems like a good time to look back at the previous four films. I won't be reviewing each film. Chances are, if you're reading this, you've either seen them, or decided not to see them based upon the reviews when they were released. I just had some thoughts about each film for discussion.
You'l find my own Photography in this blog too. Quite a while back I did a survey that tells you what kind of audience credibility your blog has. I'm not sure what the score was but I do remember the commentary which boiled down to "Your mother reads your blog regularly but you probably don't have much wider appeal". Fuck you survey! (Hi Mum, sorry for cursing! I do appreciate you reading, really I do!) I don't know how many regular readers I have, if any, but I do know, on average this blog receives more than 4000 page hits per month, much of it coming from search engines like Google. Perhaps of some interest is my new current top search entry point of all time, people looking for Bert and Ernie, who I wrote some commentary about when it was officially announced that the Sesame Street Characters were not gay . Which is quite a departure from Krippin Virus from a few years back when the movie I am Legend came out. The thing about this blog is t...
T his wasn't a movie I particularly wanted to see even though it's right in my wheelhouse, realistic Sci-fi. However, after Project Hail Mary did so well in theatres it became a movie I wanted to check out once it reached streaming. In this case I watched it on Amazon Prime Video. It wasn't really on my radar because, on the surface, it's not anything I haven't seen before, even quite recently. Lone astronaut goes on some kind of mission, mission fails, astronaut tries to salvage the mission and somehow finds a way home. However, in my opinion, what makes this film different is in the detail. There are a lot of often seen tropes here presented in new ways, that may capture your imagination. The movie opens with science teacher, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), waking up from deep sleep on a spaceship, far from Earth, with no memory of why he is there. Presumably a side effect of basically being put in storage while the spaceship travels across vast distances. From the...
Comments
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated by an actual human (me, TET) and may not publish right away. I do read all comments and only reject those not directly related to the post or are spam/scams (I'm looking at you Illuminati recruiters... I mean scammers. Stop commenting on my Illuminati post!).