Paper plane

We held the annual paper Aeroplane comp. at the January meeting of the S.C.S.A. held in the Tower room at the Bear of Rodborough

We had 12 members present at the meeting and 11 of these entered the competition. The competition rules, as usual, were that each competitor had to build an aeroplane out of a single sheet of A4 paper. All the paper sheet had to fly, any pieces cut out had to be added as ballast. Nothing extra could be added such paper-clips or sticky tape. An extra rule this year was that the paper should all be from the same batch, which the chairman had provided, so that each sheet was the same weight.

The comp got under way flying in 2s, man on man, the names being chosen at random. Doug was lucky enough to get a bye in the first round because he was the last man to be picked and there were an odd number of men.

Each pair launched simultaneously, or as near as could be judged, and the object was to keep their model in the air the for the longest time. After each pair flew the member with the shortest flight was eliminated. This was continued through several rounds until we had a final fly off which should have been between 2 men. We had 3 men with equal points at this time so we ran the final in 2 parts. The first part where all three flyers completed the best of 5 throws and this eliminated Meredith

The 2 men in the final round were Phil the Fridge and Tim Chance, who coincidentally works on aircraft design for BAC Systems at Filton.

From the performance in earlier rounds we were expecting Meredith's plane to win the contest but Tim flew some really long flights – probably getting over 3 second of airtime!

Congratulation go to Tim who now holds the prestigious trophy for the coming year.

By Chairman Bryan