Science: The Paper-Plane Caper

Until 1968 Richard Kline's only experience with aeronautical engineering was folding paper airplanes for his young son Gary. Then one day, Kline, an advertising agency art director in New York, stumbled on a radically new design; it flew more stably than any previous model, and a lot farther as well. He showed the airfoil to a pilot friend, Floyd Fogleman, who concluded that Kline had inadvertently discovered "a whole new concept in aerodynamics."

That claim may not be as high-flown as it sounds. Dr. John Nicolaides, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Notre Dame and a former NASA official, also...