lecture dart

This plane was designed in my first year at King's, in the first term, for flying in Maths 1A lectures in the Cockroft Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site. It can be thrown very hard and has a nice flat trajectory, but is by no means an out-and-out dart. It also has the benefit that it is very easy to fly - you can just pick it up off the floor and chuck it.

Notes on contruction

In terms of constrution it is slightly more awkward than Plane No. 1 to build. It has a different beginning, but the same ending folds as Plane No. 1.

Use a piece of A4 paper (297mm*210mm) to make this plane. Crease the horzontal fold, then the standard start with the diagonal folds, but only crease these.
Fold so the edge of the paper and the previous folds meet. Make sure that the folds go right to the middle of the left hand edge of the piece of paper.
The vertical crease should be made last, as it must intersect the two diagonal creases and the horizontal crease.
Same as for Plane No. 1. If the previous creases are strong then this should be obvious. The two flaps that go 'inside' will have to lie on top of each other as they both cross over the horizonal fold line. It doesn't matter which lies on top.
This is a tricky fold. The 'inside flaps' are folded inside the large triangle on the left of the paper. For each side in turn, it is easier to unfold the other side to give you room to make the fold.
As a guideline, make the fuselage about 2cm deep, and the vertical flaps about 3cm. Again, these folds need to be parallel otherwise the lift of the plane will be affected.

Notes on throwing

Fold the aeroplane so that the angles between the fuselage and wings, and the wings and the flaps are both 90 degrees. Hold just behind the slight bulge in the fuselage (about 9cm from the front of the plane), aim at your lecturer (preferable the back of his head) and throw hard. This plane excels in lecture theatres for over 300 people.

New!

Download this gzipped postscript file, done for HotOS 1999. If you print the file out on a piece of paper (double sided printing) and then fold the plane, the printed panels will correspond to the visible areas of the folded plane. If you want to play around and design your own livery, here is the tgif file which I used. Tgif is a dtp type package for unix, downloadable here.