The Geeks Way To Fly A Paper Airplane

Making paper airplanes is always fun. We’ve all done it, right? Mine don’t usually fly far, but it’s a good time to fold the paper in different ways and try a variety of techniques. The question here is, what do you do with your paper airplane after you’ve made it?

Most people fly it in their house, and if your airplanes are like mine, they fly from your chair to your couch, which is about a couple feet, and then they crash. If you are a super geek, like these three guys pictured below, you would probably think of a much more creative and technical way to fly your paper airplane, right?

After being inspired by the person who tried to send a chunk of cheese into the sky recently, they decided to do something really cool to test their plane’s ability. After making their airplane out of paper and straws (it has a three foot wingspan), they sent it sailing into the air tied to a balloon filled with helium. The balloon traveled 90,000 feet (27,432 meters or 17 miles) before popping. Here is where the super geek part comes in. They installed a tiny video camera (including sound and GPS navigation) inside the airplane so it could record its flight back to earth. Wow, how cool is that?

The two really interesting things to me here are that the plane landed with very little damage and that it took an hour and a half for it to make it back to earth. It landed 100 miles away from where it was originally released into the air. The video below is the footage that the paper airplane recorded as it made its decent back to the ground.

[via Technabob, Daily Mail]