For my Science 10 class, I had to design a paper airplane that can fly the furthest. My group decided to change the length of the plane to see which length would be able to travel the furthest. Our question was: How could the length of the plane affect the distance the plane is able to fly? As a group, we thought the plane with the shortest length would be able to travel the furthest from the two other lengths.

The original had a length of 6.9 inches from the tip to the back of the wing. There was no changes to the length of the plane whatsoever.

The second plane we folded one inch of the paper, so the mass of the plane would stay the same (minus one inch). The design of the plane started to not be my favourite because it was hard to fold the excess paper.

The third plane we folded 2 inches and it was the shortest in length. This was the one we figured would do the best at achieving the furthest distance.

These are the three planes side by side to see the length difference:

1. What did you learn? 

I learnt that a plane that is shorter doesn’t necessarily make the plane travel further. In the future, it would be cool to test out what would happen if I made the plane narrower and if that would change the distance. There were 4 phrases that I didn’t know contributed in order for a plane to travel long distances, which were drag, gravity, thrust, and lift. These 4 forces need to be balanced in order for a plane to fly more efficiently. I also didn’t know the phrase ‘aerodynamics,’ which explains how an airplane can fly in real life. It was also interesting to look at the results and the patterns. The original length actually was the best and the plane where we folded one inch I actually did the worse. I’m not sure if that was because of the design we choose, but it was still a very interesting find. 

2. What would you do different next time? 

For next time, I would probably try a variety of lengths. Such as, increasing the length to see if it would make a difference or not and compare it to the original which fared better. I would also choose another design because the one we used as a group could have effected the flight distance, and perhaps our hypotenuse is correct but not with this type of plane design. I would also try out a different type of paper, maybe a piece that is more lighter in weight to see the difference. If there was more time, I would have probably done more trials because it was hard to keep some of the constant variables the same with limited time. Such as, the angle of which the plane was thrown at or the thrust. It was hard to accurately keep the same motion when throwing the paper airplane into the air. Overall, I think it was interesting to find out that our hypothesis was actually rejected and to find out that the final results were different from what I expected them to be.