Is a paper airplane a drone? For the Federal Aviation Administration, responsible for regulating America's skies, this is no longer an idle question. The commercial use of drones is currently prohibited in the United States, unless an operator receives an exemption from the FAA that allows them to fly their drone.
Sometimes, a person accomplishes something so great, so revolutionary, that all they can do is smile as wide as humanly possible and show off the thing. This paper airplane gun, crafted by a 3-D printing and paper airplane enthusiast, is such a device. Wordlessly, the operator fires a series of paper airplanes. Then, with the top of the device removed, he reveals the assembly line inside the weapon. The gun folds the paper and then shoots it out the end -- at a rate of almost one a second.
There are lots of way to learn first-hand the principles of flight, but most of them require years of studying or a pilot's license. There is, however, an exception: folding paper airplanes. Da Vinci did it, as did the Wright Brothers and Jack Northrop, and if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. So we enlisted two master paper-plane folders, Takuo Toda (current Guinness record holder for the longest timed paper aircraft flight of 27.9 seconds) and Ken Blackburn (a former record holder and engineer at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base), to show us their best cracks at making a long-flying plane out of a sheet of super-light magazine paper.
