High Altitude Paper Airplanes

Fun & Games Science
High Altitude Paper Airplanes


Project Space Planes is a publicity stunt, but a fun and interesting one at that. Launch 100 paper planes with a particular brand of memory cards containing messages sent in from people across the Internet on a high altitude weather balloon and see what happens. Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since they launched and results are still streaming in. Currently the list includes a number of unconfirmed reports of planes found in places like Germany, Australia, Russia, India, the Netherlands, California, Canada, and South Africa.[via /.]

9 thoughts on “High Altitude Paper Airplanes

  1. Cu Spaceflight says:

    Listen, nothing dropped from 30km altitude it german is going to glide to California. Will you STOP so uncritically and unthinkingly repeating the publicity BS. It’s an embarrassment. This is precisely what these advertising agencies say – “We’ve heard they’ve got as far as California!!! But we haven’t confirmed this yet” – and they know there are enough dumb journalists out there to repeat it. It’s cretinous.

    If this was some crappy tabloid, I can understand they might fall for it. You guys however are intelligent and have critical faculties. You surely should know that a paper aeroplane dropped from 30km in Germany could not possibly glide many thousand kilometers to the other side of the world, and not only that, but to all parts of the world, as if they were all subject to completely differently directioned freak jetstream winds. It’s a London-based advertising agency trying to get publicity for their sponsor, whose name you thankfully didn’t mention.

    The story goes that Lyndon Johnson, when running for congress, wanted to spread the rumour that his opponent had indecent relations with a pig. Johnson’s campaign manager said, “Lyndon, you know he doesn’t do that!” Johnson replied, “I know. I just want to make him deny it.” This is the point – once you let it out it doesn’t matter if it’s not true, it’ll just get repeated and won’t go away. You are better than this, and should at least provide a qualifier than some simple logic and sums would suggest that most of that list is marketing crap and lies.

    Gosh. /rant

  2. Cu Spaceflight says:

    Listen, nothing dropped from 30km altitude it german is going to glide to California. Will you STOP so uncritically and unthinkingly repeating the publicity BS. It’s an embarrassment. This is precisely what these advertising agencies say – “We’ve heard they’ve got as far as California!!! But we haven’t confirmed this yet” – and they know there are enough dumb journalists out there to repeat it. It’s cretinous.

    If this was some crappy tabloid, I can understand they might fall for it. You guys however are intelligent and have critical faculties. You surely should know that a paper aeroplane dropped from 30km in Germany could not possibly glide many thousand kilometers to the other side of the world, and not only that, but to all parts of the world, as if they were all subject to completely differently directioned freak jetstream winds. It’s a London-based advertising agency trying to get publicity for their sponsor, whose name you thankfully didn’t mention.

    The story goes that Lyndon Johnson, when running for congress, wanted to spread the rumour that his opponent had indecent relations with a pig. Johnson’s campaign manager said, “Lyndon, you know he doesn’t do that!” Johnson replied, “I know. I just want to make him deny it.” This is the point – once you let it out it doesn’t matter if it’s not true, it’ll just get repeated and won’t go away. You are better than this, and should at least provide a qualifier than some simple logic and sums would suggest that most of that list is marketing crap and lies.

    Gosh. /rant

  3. Remote Control Plane says:

    Yes! Launch hundreds or thousands. Go to a big company for the money to finance the project. Print its logo in the planes and film their launch. Award the first who find one plane with $1M or so. Etc.

  4. Paper plane game score says:

    There’s a wide variety of difficulty involved in these kind of games, with some getting advanced missions with plenty of objectives, while others becoming easy “shoot-em-up” online games. Cardstock planes …Paper Plane Game

  5. this domain says:

    this domain

    High Altitude Paper Airplanes | Make:

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