QUEENS, New York - I knew I was in trouble the moment I walked into the Great Hall at the New York Hall of Science to take part in (and cover) a paper plane contest for wired.com.
This place was lousy with ringers.
There were entries from as far away as Sweden and Britain, a display of great bravado and confidence. Rowan
Andruscavage drove up from Washington – he has a website devoted to innovative paper airplane design called Exotic Paper Aircraft.
Howard Fink, an IT technician at NYU, has been re-engineering a paper plane that won a similar event in this very place for the past 40 years.
I, on the other hand, schlepped in from mid-town after a night of Halloween parties armed with a design that won my third grade plane contest. It wasn't even my design. I made Frank
Marcelino teach me how to make it after he won.
The stakes were not high, but the bragging rights considerable. Some of the best entries would be part of a new book – each design given to its own page, perforated for the engineering challenged.
And then there was the historical import: this contest was a replay of a 1967 competition re-staged by The Public
Art Fund in collaboration with artist Klara Hobza. Inspired by a used book she found on that first contest,
Hobza decided to stage a contest for the new millennium, with a matching book.
So this is the flag-waving mess my editor got me into. On a Saturday, no less.
And then there were the rules I didn't bother to check out in advance. Turns out there were six categories here in the big leagues:
Distance Flown,
Children’s Division, Duration Aloft, Beauty, Spectacular Failure, and
Surprise.
I thought we were competing only for distance. I did alright, but my entry twisted off to the side and came to the ground far too early.
Andruscavage won the distance competition handily. After speaking to him for just a few moments, I could understand why — he had an airplane design for nearly every possible purpose. His prototype for the “Spectacular Failure” category involved water.
I realized I’d need a new strategy to compete in the other categories I had pretty much just heard about. I decided to go with what had worked for me before: elementary school kids.
The kids at this event were impressive. When they weren’t test flying and improving their planes, they were drawing planes and talking to anyone who would listen to them talk about planes. They created great successes — most of their distance planes were as good or better than the adult planes.
Jonathan Carcamo won the children’s competition, and his plane could have given Andruscavage a run for his money in a head to head contest. He and his brother John were busy building planes and teaching other kids about them when I came by to chat. They proceeded to teach me how to make multiple planes — the defender, the raptor, the dart, the helicopter, even “some that have no names, they just fly pretty good.”
Even better for me, they were disqualified from the other categories due to age discrimination. So we created a little kiddie paper plane sweat shop that came up with prototypes for the four remaining categories: Time Aloft, Beauty, Surprise and Magnificent Failure.
When I spoke to Hobza about the event, she told me: “Creating paper airplanes is rooted in the human fascination with inventiveness. I’m thinking about paper airplanes from the aspect of an artist, but today is about straight up competition.”
And my team of plane makers was there to compete. Some of them realized that the age regulations weren’t all that stringent. Boy Scout Eric Genovese went on to win the beauty competition on his own.
The others were there with me, but we did run into a few snags. First off, the judges seemed unmoved by an adult entering the artwork of an 11-year old in the Beauty division. Jonathan’s Technicolor defender plane got no respect. Our entry for time aloft had nothing on Fink’s glider, I suspect his four decades of experience may have given him a bit of an edge there. And then John flew his “Surprise” plane into the Great Hall’s honeycomb wall just before takeoff.
In the end, Hobza and The Public Art Fund deemed the event a great success. There were planes soaring around the room for hours, with kids and adults learning and teaching all day long. Trade secrets and improvements passed around the room, and more than a few prototypes may stay to adorn the cubbies in the walls of the Great Hall for years to come.
Hobza was positively ecstatic about the turn out and told me she found the entire event “Hilarious. I didn’t expect such a lively event, with quite a good amount of experts.”
There were quite a few lessons to be learned from this day of fun, joviality and ingenuity put to the test, but one was most important: clearly, this contest was rigged.
