Flight

Questions:

Will different shapes and sizes of paper planes affect how far the plane travels?

Will the shape and size affect how many times it turns?

Research Summary:

There are four main forces that affect the way aircrafts fly, these forces are called weight, lift, drag and thrust. When the aircraft takes off the main forces that help this process are thrust and lift, the thrust is what helps pull the aircraft off the ground and lift helps control where the aircraft goes, drag and weight only have a little bit of power in the take-off process, they make sure the plane doesn’t go too high and out of control.

Drag is the force that works against thrust, drag is caused by air resistance that pulls the aircraft backwards. Weight is caused by gravity, which pulls things towards the surface of the earth. When and if a plane comes crashing back down to earth it mostly means that the drag and weight have taken over… or you just have a bad pilot. However when you slowly come back to the ground this means that you are coming in to land safely, the drag increases at a good pace and the thrust and lift have almost gone.

Hypothesis

Smaller planes will travel further because they are lighter, larger planes will do more loops because they have more weight however they won’t go as far.

Materials:

• Paper
• Something to mark out where the plane landed
• A big empty space to conduct the experiment
• A human or 2 humans to conduct this experiment

Procedure:

Make sure you throw the paper plane at the same height each time. Make sure that the one person does Stingray and one person does Dolphin to make sure you get accurate results

1. Make the paper aeroplane by following this video
2. Make another paper plane with this video
3. Find an open space to test
4.   Test the A3 Stingray and the A4 Stingray to see what one went further, repeat with the Dolphin.
5. Chose the winning plane from each round and see which one can go further
6. Compare the results to find the ultimate winner of this experiment!

Observations/Results:

Discussion:

The results of our experiment were good and bad because the small planes travelled further than the big planes, however, the big planes didn’t do any loops. When the experiment was in action we found that the plane would fly different each time because you would throw it differently.

When we were testing we found some interesting things, when flying the A3 planes they didn’t fly as far, I thought that those planes would travel further distances because the planes that fly in the sky today are very heavy. But that thought was wrong because the smaller planes flew much more than the big ones.

Some questions that formed while the experiment was happening was: why do the bigger planes fly shorter distances? And, What if we made and flew really small planes?

Some things that may have made a difference in testing was sometimes the planes would land into some water and make the weight of the paper heavier and when we flew the planes there was some wind. But other than that, the testing was good.

Conclusion:

Our hypothesis was correct and incorrect, the part that was correct was the fact that smaller planes flew further, larger planes, however, weren’t much heavier, so they didn’t do any loops. All the A3 planes flew to about the same length as the others, and the small planes, they went different distances but stayed within 7-11 meters.

                   The Dolphin                                                           The Stingray