High-altitude paper airplane flight

Here's a delightful video of a paper airplane's flight from 300 feet above New York City.
Link (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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do6star

The score is from the film ‘Birth’ by Alexandre Desplat. Lovely sounds…
Philbert

I was mainly drooling about the location. I’m pretty sure that where he lives is one of the most expensive locations per square meter in the world. The man has a view on the Brooklyn Bridge for goodness sake!
Anonymous

As a child with my brother and Dad we threw a hundred or so paper airplanes from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. It was great fun.

More amazingly one plane caught a nice air current and sailed east for quite a ways. I lost sight (to this day I have 20-15 vision) of that plane in the smoke from a smoke stack on the other side of the East River…
strider_mt2k

Wow that was great.

Somehow I still expected it to hit someone in the eye. (stupid programming)

I know I’ve always wanted to so something similar, but my idea revolved around lofting a large foam glider with a balloon.

A large foam glider from that window might be fun, but might also cause undue concern and or unintentional mayhem.

So be sure you record that too if ya do it.
igpajo

Love it! Some friends and I use to do something similar from the top story of a parking garage in downtown Spokane. We’d grab about a dozen ad flyers from a department store and go up to the top of his 7 or 8 story parking garage and throw two and three at a time and see who’s flew the furthest, who’s stayed aloft the longest.
Nothing compared to the video but it brought back memories.
Jeff

Very nice. Now if it had only exploded on impact. That would have been extra cool.
EdT.

This type of reckless behavior would not have been tolerated under the Giuliani mayorship. The perpetrator would have been apprehended for littering and terroristic behavior and then accidentally shot 47 times (an origami gun would be planted at the scene).
tresser

i thought i remember a link from BB that showed a cat throwing an airplane from the Eiffel Tower. the cameraman followed its very slow and long descent down where it finally laid rest on the street below.

sadly, my google-fu fails me in trying to find a copy of this vid.
carina

http://youtube.com/user/samfuller
this is the filmmaker. he’s great, bay area native now located in brooklyn.
KurtMac

If I lived in a high rise this is ALL I would do at every pause of free time throughout the day!

Gosh, this reminds me, I have at least 100 “White Wings” paper airplanes collecting dust in my basement that I built as a kid.

http://www.whitewings.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_plane#White_Wings

These were awesome paper airplanes (I’ve got the original all-paper ones, not the pre-cut balsa ones) that resembled actual gliders and airplanes of history. They could be fine tuned stay aloft in updrafts and thermal pockets.

Does anybody live in a hi-rise that I could stop by and have a paper airplane launching party?!
pinstripewizard

did no one notice the crappy parallel park? best part of the film!
Phos….

Used to do this as a kid in Harrisburg PA. Pops worked in a news bureau and I made extra-large planes from the accordian-folded teletype paper (each leaf was 8.5″ X 22″ IIRC). Up to the 15th-floor(?) roof of the Payne Shoemaker bldg on 3rd Street, and let ‘er rip. Good times, good times.
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Oh, and I wonder how well the driver of the SUV near the end of the video would do parallel parking with cars in front and behind the space. They sure did a rotten job with all the room in the world.

:)
verySmartApe

Anyone know what track is playing in the background?