Rubber Band Airplanes



If you have children, you may have considered building your own rubber band Airplanes, or you might have rather purchased a kit at the hobby store. The miniature balsa wood airplanes that either snap or are held together with glue are more fun than you might think, at least for kids. Children are drawn to a toy that flies through the air, whether it is in a gym, at a park, or in a civic center. The almost weightless balsa wood creations inspired by the achievements of the Wright brothers take off into the air under the power of a rubber band. But to get these small airplanes off the ground and into the air, neither you nor the children need worry about the mathematical formulas and aerodynamics involved in designing real airplanes. This information, collected, compiled, and now time proven for accuracy to be used in the modern manufacture of airplanes was only in its infancy around the turn of the century.



It was only about 110 years ago that Orville and Wilbur Wright traveled from their home in Ohio, where they found the perfect place for testing of their designs of heavier-than-air aircraft, which certainly were not rubber band powered. Having received locations where wind and terrain would be suitable for aircraft testing from Octave Chanute, a brilliant railroad engineer who became interested in flight and compiled current information into a book titled, Progress in Flying Machines, the brothers were confident that they had the best offshore wind combined with soft sand dunes in case an airplanes flight ran amok.

Now, no doubt the brothers had never built or flown any rubber band airplane as children. However, it was no impediment to the development of their gasoline-powered airplane with a fuel injection type system, the whole engine being built in only six weeks by their bicycle assistant. Had they had a proper upbringing as children of today have, they would have considered powering it with a very large rubber band, twisted until if formed grotesque gyrations on itself, but unable to store all the energy necessary for a real powered flight.

When children fly their little airplanes, they will not to worry about guidance with a wing-warping system, a forward elevator for pitch control, or a rear rudder mechanism for side-to-side control, with inherent instability of differential drag caused by the wing-warping mechanism. These are all elements of the three-axis control system that the Wright brothers used. And the wing camber and aspect ratio factors are not considered by the companies who design airplane kits for machine stamped balsa wood that will be launched by hand with the power of a simple rubber band.