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• I had two different paper airplane calendars from 2006. I thought that I would review them here to save everybody some trouble.

  1. Page-a-day calendar as used above in the videos was a pretty big disappointment. When they say 40 original models, what they mean is that there are only 40 models in the calendar that just repeat. I quit after making the models three or four times. The icing on the cake though was only one of the models (of 40!) actually flew well reliably. The others usually didn't fly well at all, so I'd tweak them for a few minutes and then I could get them to at least not spin out of control, but as soon as they hit anything, they were done. It was disappointing in a sense. One point to note is that this calendar was done by two different people. They alternated days. One of the people insisted on military or commercial imitations, which I think is silly and it routinely produced planes that required scissors and tape and planes that flew worse than the other designers.

  2. 365 Tiny Paper Airplanes was another calendar. It was more disappointing in one sense and less in another. This calendar only came with six (yes, six!) different models. You made them every week. Saturday and Sunday were two identical half-page models (just the paper helicopter thing). What made this calendar better than the other one is that they all flew well. I wasn't disappointed in any of the planes. I didn't ever have to do much tweaking and the results were stunning. I guess that's what you should expect from the world-record paper airplane guy. One final problem with this calendar is that most of the planes required scissors, which I find lame. I'm a real fan of good designs that don't require scissors and don't require tape.

  I'm waiting for someone to put out a calendar with 365 completely different planes, where a majority fly. I know that's a pretty daunting task, but it would be much less disappointing than what is actually out there today.

  Posted by: arlencox on January 23, 2007 at 7:29 AM

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