>>John Collins: So I am John Collins, the current world record holder.
I'm in love with flight, things that fly.
And I have been curious about how things fly and why things fly for a very long time now.
And it led me to invent a whole series of planes.
Am I not cued up on my PowerPoint?
First slide.
There we go.
So a whole series of planes.
These are some planes I have invented.
I want to walk you through just a couple of them here just for fun.
This is a circular design that gets its directional stability from how fast it's spinning.
That's how that flies.
It is kind of a fun airplane.
You throw it a little bit like a football.
You guys can feel free to throw these.
I will get to you, Mitch.
Don't worry about it.
The second one I want to show you is a canard design.
It has a small wing in front.
That means that the front of the plane will stall first and keep the main wing flying.
It is stall resistant.
Here, Mitch.
A little bit over Mitch.
I will get to you, Mitch.
And the third one here, I was curious about whether or not you could actually fold two
pieces of paper together and turn it into a flying machine.
Really kind of an elegant flying machine.
The other thing I'm curious about -- sorry, I think I hit it one too many times.
Can we go back one slide?
The difference between a dart a glider -- and this is key to breaking the world record -- we
actually changed how the world record is going to be broken in the future for distance planes.
This is a dart, a very fast plane, flies very far, very fast.
And this is a glider, a slower flying -- that was a terrible throw.
Throw that back.
Let me give it another -- [ Laughter ]
>>John Collins: I just want more try at that.
Just throw it back.
It is not as easy as it looks.
Is it?
Let me grab this one.
Mark Burnett just threw my plane!
There we go.
Broad-winged glider, what's the difference in that?
We will get to that in just a minute.
The difference in those kinds of airplanes is really key.
Let's back up.
I mean, you just heard Brian Grazer say that he was confused about how things fly.
The reality is nobody, nobody knows how things fly.
The cause and effect is not understood.
The two leading theories contradict each other.
Bernoulli says faster moving stream of air causes low pressure.
The other leading theory says the low pressure causes the faster moving stream of air.
If we back up just a moment and just define a wing, a wing as an object that can become
supported by the air by interacting with the air, how can you look at a wing and just not
be curious about that?
[ Applause ] >>John Collins: Of course, the first people
to really seriously think about flight, they were certain that a flapping machine was going
to be the way to fly.
Turns out not to be correct.
That's only efficient for small biological units.
But speaking of flapping machines, this was an airplane that I would like to call a spectacular
failure.
It did not start out to be the bat plane, which is what it turned into.
It started out to be the seagull.
And I invented this plane when I was working on a couple of other planes.
And one of them was a swan plane.
I will be the first person to admit nobody actually needs a swan head stuck to a paper
airplane.
But if you could, why not?
And the other thing I was working on at the time was a pelican plane.
Really, do you need a pelican plane?
No.
But that's pretty fun to have.
And then I thought, well, those worked out okay.
I'll do a seagull.
You can see I got the wing shape about right, but something extraordinary happened when
I threw this plane for the first time.
Watch what happens.
See the wings?
This is why you have backups to your backups.
See how the wings kind of shake a little bit as it flies?
That had me puzzled.
I was really curious for a couple of weeks why that was happening.
It took me two whole weeks to figure out how that was actually flying.
Once I figured it out, I knew I could fold exactly the same plane with much thinner paper.
Okay.
I think everybody in this room is old enough to remember phone books, right?
The first non-volatile means of information storage, social networking idea.
This is the same plane folded with phone book paper.
It's alive!
So the first disappointing thing is that the flapping does not help it fly.
That's disappointing, right?
But what's happening is the body of the plane is so flexible that the plane actually has
-- it wants to go through a stall phase.
The center of gravity is behind the center of lift.
So it climbs and stalls.
The wings flex together.
Apex to the stall, no more pressure, the wings relax, and then it flies and stalls and flies
and stalls.
So it is actually a terrible aircraft.
You would never want to ride in that, but it is pretty fun.
That's the bat plane.
Now, I have another flapping plane here, and I debuted that when I was on a TV show with
this guy, Conan.
And the first time I had seen this plane, it was at the Red Bull finals in Austria.
And two guys were flying this plane in the aerobatics competition, and I was blown away.
I thought I was the only guy that had invented a flapping airplane.
So I went up to them and said: Whose plane is this?
They said, This is your plane.
It is this plane.
Now, here's the plane that I saw at Red Bull.
Kind of a crazy plane.
Kind of undulates as it flies.
Yeah.
Throw them around.
It is pretty fun.
Mr. GoPro, of course, will throw it.
Ahead.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Throw the plane.
Yeah.
Undulating plane.
So that plane is actually -- nice.
That plane is the boomerang plane.
But it is folded with taller paper.
And the reason it is folded with taller paper is because everybody else around the worlds
uses A4 instead of 8 1/2 by 11.
And so all of the layers break right at the leading edge, and that causes that nice flapping
motion.
Here's what this plane was originally designed to do.
It was designed to boomerang back.
Now, most people guess when they see that do that, they think that I have bent a rudder
control in that.
That's not true because it will circle left.
It will circle right.
And if I throw it straight, it does a loop.
Right into the camera, yeah!
[ Laughter ] >>John Collins: So the loop tells you that
the center of gravity is behind the center of lift.
That's what makes it climb.
There is something else going on with this plane, and it is called dihedral angle.
It is a fancy term for how the wings are attached to the body of the plane.
And positive dihedral angle works like this: If the wings are sloped upward and I lean
the plane over and throw it, it rocks back to neutral and just keeps on flying.
Good catch.
So positive dihedral angle, you can throw it leaned over, rocks back to neutral.
Take a look at the boomerang plane.
Good throw.
The wings are drooping.
And that defeats that whole effect.
So if I throw it in a banked attitude, it stays in a banked attitude.
And because the center of gravity is behind the center of lift, it just climbs its way
in a circle back to me.
Really fun.
So negative dihedral angle, people have been studying that.
They know about negative dihedral angle.
The Wright Brothers aircraft, in fact, was a negative dihedral angle aircraft.
And here's a couple of other -- this was the fat glider.
The wings are drooping.
It circles back.
Kind of fun.
The other plane you see there is the Max Lock.
This guy has been really finnicky all day long.
Let's hope it circles back.
Nice gentle plane.
But if you are the paper airplane guy, what you really need is a plane that flies out,
flips over, and flies back upside down.
>>> Whoa!
[ Applause ] >>John Collins: So that crazy bit of flight
-- I keep looking back.
I have got one of these right here -- it's caused by a very flexible center crease.
And, again, the center of gravity is behind the center of lift so it does a crazy tip
stall.
But on the way out, it has positive dihedral angle.
And then on the way back, upside down, it has positive dihedral angle.
So really fun.
Really fun plane.
Now, the difference between a dart and a glider, the old world record holder used that thin
plane over there.
You can see it is just basically like a stick with fins and it took three seconds and you
released at a 45-degree angle and it just kind of crashed into the finish line.
That's how it used to be done.
Let's take a look at how we did it and watch the launch angle.
Our launch angle is nearly flat.
Go ahead and roll that video.
[ Video playing ] >>> There it is.
There it is.
We are all over that one.
That's going to do it.
Get up there!
[ Applause ] [ Video ends ]
>>John Collins: That's enough of that.
Really a little excited that day.
That was the end of a three-year journey.
And so one of the things we discovered in this three-year journey was how to turn what
was essentially a dart competition into a glider competition.
And we did it two ways.
First of all, we just couldn't throw a dart that far.
That was thing number one.
So we had to come up with a new way to do it.
And once we started playing around with gliders, one thing we realized about a glider was that
you needed some stability.
You needed positive dihedral angle, but the problem is dihedral adds drag.
So every time you make it more stable you are slowing the plane down.
The other thing that we did -- and we discovered in Mohave -- was that the air separates from
the wing very close to the nose when the plane is traveling quickly, when you launch it.
And as the plane slows down, the air can adhere further back.
So what I did is create a glider that changes the shape based upon the speed that it's flying.
I put very flat dihedral angle at the nose so that when it is in launch phase and the
air is separating from the nose of the plane, it's going -- it's encountering very little
drag.
As the air can adhere further back, as the plane is slowing down and the air adheres
further back, it hits this greater dihedral angle and then it gets more stability.
This is an idea that simply had not been tried, had not been done and it ended up being the
world record idea.
And I come to places like Zeitgeist and I come to schools, and I really enjoy -- not
that you guys aren't a great audience.
You are probably my second or maybe sixth favorite audience, but I come to schools because
paper airplanes are a really soft way into science.
It's something kids can pick up and fly and devise their own experiment and get the results
instantly and then go back and try it again.
So there's this cycle of experiment, gathering results, reexperimenting.
And I believe it's really, really important to hard wire our kids with science now, because
we have a number of global issues that are only going to have science-based answers.
We have water shortages, energy shortages, food shortages, global warming.
We need every brain working on this.
We don't have any spare brains.
We need kids taking simple ideas and making them more efficient, making them better, coming
up with new ways to do what we already know how to do.
And this is just one example of how to do that.
So I want to thank all you guys for coming to Zeitgeist.
I want to thank Zeitgeist for having me here.
I'll be at the sandbox if anyone wants to learn how to make the world record plane.
But here is to the curious.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]