Big Boys at Play

Who in the world, past grade school age, flies paper airplanes? Nobody, it seems, except a legion of physicists, engineers, pilots and otherwise normal adults who begin folding up at the very sight of a plain piece of paper. What coaxed their secret hobby out into the open was the Scientific American's tongue-in-cheek announcement three months ago that it would sponsor the First International Paper-Airplane Competition. The paper-plane buffs took the offer seriously, so much so that the magazine found itself inundated with 10,941 entries from 49 states and 26 foreign countries.

To winnow the entries down to 41 finalists, the magazine first called on graduate students associated with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for preliminary flight trials. Then, last week, all was ready for the grand three-hour fly-off of the finalists in New York's cavernous Hall of Science, a building in Flushing Meadow left over from the 1964-65 World's Fair. To keep the competition equally fair, the neutral students were tapped again as launchers, and contestants were separated into nonprofessionals and professionals (subscribers or people employed in aviation). As the paper planes swooped, looped and soared around the 96-ft.-high dome, Scientific American Publisher Gerard Piel, 52, called out the maneuvers on a p.a. system: "There's a snap stall--a pair of Immelmanns and a chandelle--a barrel roll--and a series of butterfly dives."

Air-Worthless but Elegant. Intently following the course of the planes as they crashed into walls, plunged beneath chairs or fluttered helplessly to the floor were eight judges, including a woman parachutist, the pilot of the Goodyear blimp, a senior researcher of Princeton's aerodynamics laboratory, and the owner of Manhattan's Go Fly A Kite store. Using stop watches, tape measures and esthetic expertise, the judges picked winners in four different categories: duration aloft, distance flown, aerobatics and origami (the ancient Japanese art of paper folding).

Winners of the duration awards were Ford Motor Co. Engineering Consultant Frederick J. Hooven, whose tissue-paper "flying wing" stayed airborne for 10.2 seconds, and Missile-Motor Salesman

Jerry A. Brinkman, whose elaborately elevatored glider (see diagram) lasted 9.4 seconds. Distance awards went to Berkeley Physicist Robert Meuser (89 ft.) and Stewart-Warner Corp. Engineer Louis W. Schultz, whose 11-in.-long delta wing, made of graph paper, flew 58 ft. 2 in. before skidding to a stop. Pioneer Naval Aviator Ralph S. Barnaby, 74, took the aerobatics prize with a stabilizer-equipped glider that gracefully floated through two complete outside loops. Brown University Anthropologist James Sakoda folded his way to the origami award; his swept-wing craft proved air-worthless, but the judges admired it all the same for its "elegance and rigidity."

Down-Under Glider. The also-flowns were as notable as the winners. One contestant sent in a dollar bill folded into a glider with the explanation: "It goes fast." There was a flying-saucerlike "Frisbee Flyer"--two paper plates and an infinitesimal folded fleck of foil only one-eighth of an inch long by one-sixteenth of an inch wide--made, appropriately, by Aerospace Corp.'s Space

Particles and Field Department. A paper caricature of Snoopy, the mutt in Peanuts, had ears for wings, rear paws for tail assembly; since it was unflyable, it was suspended from a Kleenex parachute. Australia was represented by a long, beak-nosed glider. "It will probably fly upside down in the Northern Hemisphere," predicted the Qantas executive who sent it to the contest. The only direction it flew on three successive flights was straight down under.

The contest was inspired, says Publisher Piel, by hopes of a design breakthrough applicable to supersonic transport. According to the judges, none appeared. Said Princeton Professor David C. Hazen: "We've seen nothing we haven't seen before." Publisher Piel was not discouraged. He sticks with his original postulate that "there is, right now, flying down some hallway or out of some movie-house balcony in Brooklyn, the aircraft that will make the SST 30 years obsolete." But Piel's seven-year-old daughter Nelle remained unconvinced. Said she: "I think it's silly. It's just for advertising."

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