In Seattle: the Right Stuff, with Paper and Glue

By DAN GOODGAME

The pilot hurled his rakish craft into a steep and punishing climb, high above the cheering audience and the aeronautics engineers busily jotting notes on clipboards. The plane almost stalled, but it managed to pull level before it swooped back home, scattering the judges as it buzzed their table, ducked under a chalkboard and finally slammed into the bleachers. The scene was not Edwards Air Force Base but Seattle's Kingdome, where fans usually cheer the flight of baseballs and footballs. The prototype was only 10 in. long, and its sortie of 16.26 seconds had just won the time-aloft event, professional division, in the Second Great International Paper Airplane Competition.

The 4,600 entries came in from Maine and Montana, Bangladesh and Britain, Italy and Iran, South Africa and Saudi Arabia and Yugoslavia. There were big planes folded from 3-ft. sheets of heavy poster paper and little ones from bits of waxy British toilet tissue. One anxious aeronautics engineer flew in from Kansas to hand-deliver his delicate creations, while another tucked his into a cereal box insulated by stale flakes of Corn Total. A third, with touching trust in the U.S. Postal Service, simply scrawled the contest address across the wings of his plane and plastered a stamp onto its nose. They were competing in four events -- distance, time aloft, aerobatics and aesthetic design -- in three divisions, professional, nonprofessional and junior. The cardinal rule was that the planes had to be made from paper, tape and glue.

The youngest contestant was three, while one seven-year-old veteran wrote confidently on his entry that "I've been making paper planes for four years now and this is my best one yet." A suitcase-size carton from Abilene, Texas, was stuffed with planes from an entire elementary school, but of the total entries, less than half were in the under-14 junior division. Said Alison Fujino, a contest coordinator: "What I love most about this event is that it draws all these high-tech geeks out of their closets and lets them be kids again."

Hundreds of competitors entered as professionals, solemnly defined as "teachers and graduate students in aeronautics and related fields, as well as engineers, designers and others employed in the aerospace industry." One was James Zongker from the Boeing Co. Wichita plant. His sleek "X-21Bmk-5" recently set the Guinness indoor record for distance (164 ft. 4 in.). Another pro was Roland Mayer, chief engineer for General Electric's military space programs, whose "Beercan Bomber," carved out of a Miller Lite can, was disqualified because of its materials but still much admired. Commercial Pilot Anthony Martin of Talkeetna, Alaska, sent along 28 pages of instructions describing how to coax barrel rolls, chandelles and phugoid oscillations (downward arcs) from his two aerobatics entries, which were frugally folded from pink while-you-were-out message sheets.

Few contestants went so far as Martin, but almost all wrote out their instructions. Only a handful were able to accompany their planes to Seattle and, to deny them any advantage, none was allowed to throw his own entry. That task was assigned to a team of volunteers, many of them pilots and engineers from Seattle's aerospace industry. Professional airframe experts also were on hand with X-Acto knives and Testor cement to patch planes with torn airfoils or warped control surfaces. Volunteer Plane Tosser Gary Lee Beard, a Viet Nam flying veteran who now tests executive aircraft for a Seattle firm, shrugged and explained, "Hey, we may as well do it right. This is how the Wright brothers got started." (The contest's distance champ flew more than 141 ft., or 21 ft. farther than the Wright brothers' first flight.)

Beard and other official hurlers were suffering paper-plane elbow long before the finals, laboring to weed out the hundreds of hope less nose-divers and Niekro knuckleballers. Then there were the planes that preferred the great circle route. One canary-colored crowd pleaser had to be launched into the bleachers, in the opposite direction from the distance markers. It climbed bravely, banked steadily left and eventually wandered onto the course, nailing the 120-ft. marker, to loud applause.

Early in the distance competition, the judges were called upon to define the very essence of an aircraft. Some entrants had designed Frisbee-like flying disks, in one case from a paper picnic plate embossed with daffodils. Another entered a wad of paper hardened with tape and glue, and inscribed with the instruction THROW VERY HARD. The golf-ball-size wad was stomping the winged competition with trial throws of 180 ft. and more, but eventually the judges (two aeronautics professors, a professional paper-plane designer, a science magazine editor and Apollo Astronaut Michael Collins) ruled out balls and disks alike.

In the end, eight of the prizes were won by entries from Japan, where crafting paper airplanes is a popular activity that flows naturally from the centuries-old art of origami. Tatsuo Yoshida, a career paper-plane designer whose books sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year, won the aerobatics and time-aloft events in the pro division with elegantly simple designs modeled after the swallows around his home in Yokohama. Yoshida flew to Seattle, with an interpreter and at his own expense, just to see his flock perform. He scarcely spoke to his arch rival, Yasuaki Ninomiya, who was a judge in the contest and who spent most of his time promoting his own mass- produced stiffly laminated paper planes.

Happily, amid such solemn commercialism, the kids and other cutups had their moments of triumph too. Robert Meuser of Oakland won the nonprofessional distance event with an entry that looked more like an arrow than a plane, and that sailed almost 20 ft. past the best Japanese pro. Eltin Lucero, 12, of Pueblo, Colo., won the junior distance contest with the classic single-sheet delta-wing design favored by generations of schoolchildren.

The kids in the audience seemed to prefer the brightly hued and wildly imaginative entries in the aesthetic design and aerobatics events. There were butterflies, dragonflies, bats, flying Supermen and airborne pineapples, as well as F-14 scale models, Star Wars fighters and twin-rotor helicopters. Curtis Haynie, 8, of Hood River, Ore., said his favorite was the slime-green "Flying Lizard," which, according to handling instructions written by its owner, should be fed "small rodents, twice daily." Contest sponsors emphasized that a child's interest in paper planes may lead to a career in aerospace, and even to breakthroughs in design. A case in point was Robert C. Manson, who grew obsessed with paper planes as a schoolboy and now, at 26, is a design engineer for Pratt & Whitney in Montreal. He explained: "What makes a paper plane fly well, the lift and balance and aerodynamic design, is what makes a real plane fly well. The principles are the same."

Simon Daughert, a local eleven-year-old with copper hair and a bespectacled, scholarly expression, allowed that he had been known to fly a plane or two in the classroom, and that he was skipping school to watch the Friday morning finale of the paper-plane contest. "I was going to be a chemist," he said wistfully, "but seeing all these neat designs is making me think about aerospace."