Paper Airplanes (Paper Gliders)

As if one didn't have enough paper airplanes being made around one's house already! But, of course, there are so many variations on the basic paper glider. You can learn a lot from making them! There are tons of tutorials on YouTube, all promising to be the best, longest, fanciest flier in some way. My boys enjoyed making this one that looks like an F-22.

This shows how to make a paper "jet."

Here's another good model.

As I mentioned on another post, this site shows how to make a paper glider that uses flaps and elevators to move in different ways. It's a good hands-on way to experiment with how and why these surfaces affect the plane the way they do.

This site has a bunch of interesting glider designs.

This is an interesting little glider, made with two paper hoops! It works surprisingly well. Instructions here.

Homemade Hovercraft

Well, it's not as cool as this one. But, it's pretty cool to see this little balloon hovercraft at work. And it just takes a minute to make. Instructions are here (or a thousand other places on the web.)

If you want to see it, you know…hovering (really just sliding around), you can watch this enthralling video.

Parts of an Airplane

Sebastian always loves to draw and label things. (He spent his free time drawing this hyper-accurate plane mural one day.) He knows the parts of a plane far better than I do. But, for the benefit of the rest of us, we spent a day learning about the control surfaces of an airplane. I will never again be bored when I have to sit looking out the window at the wing of a plane! There are lots of interesting things going on on those wings! :)

This site shows how to make a paper glider that uses flaps and elevators to move in different ways. It's a good hands-on way to experiment with how and why these surfaces affect the plane the way they do.

Here's Abe giving a brief demonstration of that.

Here is a worksheet for filling in the parts of an airplane, and what they do.

And here is the answer key for that worksheet.

Aerodynamics and the Forces of Flight

You can't swing a cat in the Aviation Education world without hitting something about "The Four Forces of Flight." There's no shortage of resources, but I'll include a few of our favorites.

This site is just great, all around. It talks about aerodynamics, forces, propulsion, materials, and so forth, and it has lots of good little animations and videos.

This is a very good discussion of the effects besides Bernoulli's principle that act on an airplane to help it fly. When I emailed my physicist brother about the fact that we were studying aviation, he immediately wrote back, "Did you run into any controversy about whether or not Bernoulli's principle really makes them fly?  There's a perennial 'Bernoulli!'  'No, angle of attack!' discussion, as if they both can't apply." Ha! And we HAD run into it. This site does a good job of showing that multiple factors are involved.

Here's another good overview site, with some activities.

This video about the four forces of flight was thorough, and entertaining.

This is a really fun lesson plan about flight. This is where we got the idea for our "drag chute," pictured above and below. It's a very effective illustration of how strong drag can be!

We also had fun making "Magnus Flyers," which we learned about from this video. They are very interesting little gliders! You can see Sebastian demonstrating how they work here: