In Seattle: the Right Stuff, with Paper and Glue

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The pilot hurled his rakish craft into a steep and punishing climb, high above the cheering audience and the aeronautics engineers busily jotting notes on clipboards. The plane almost stalled, but it managed to pull level before it swooped back home, scattering the judges as it buzzed their table, ducked under a chalkboard and finally slammed into the bleachers. The scene was not Edwards Air Force Base but Seattle's Kingdome, where fans usually cheer the flight of baseballs and footballs. The prototype was only 10 in. long, and its sortie of 16.26 seconds had just won the time-aloft event, professional division, in the Second Great International Paper Airplane Competition.

The 4,600 entries came in from Maine and Montana, Bangladesh and Britain, Italy and Iran, South Africa and Saudi Arabia and Yugoslavia. There were big planes folded from 3-ft. sheets of heavy poster paper and little ones from bits of waxy British toilet tissue. One anxious aeronautics engineer flew in from Kansas to hand-deliver his delicate creations, while another tucked his into a cereal box insulated by stale flakes of Corn Total. A third, with touching trust in the U.S. Postal Service, simply scrawled the contest address across the wings of his plane and plastered a stamp onto its nose. They were competing in four events -- distance, time aloft, aerobatics and aesthetic design -- in three divisions, professional, nonprofessional and junior. The cardinal rule was that the planes had to be made from paper, tape and glue.

The youngest contestant was three, while one seven-year-old veteran wrote confidently on his entry that "I've been making paper planes for four years now and this is my best one yet." A suitcase-size carton from Abilene, Texas, was stuffed with planes from an entire elementary school, but of the total entries, less than half were in the under-14 junior division. Said Alison Fujino, a contest coordinator: "What I love most about this event is that it draws all these high-tech geeks out of their closets and lets them be kids again."

Hundreds of competitors entered as professionals, solemnly defined as "teachers and graduate students in aeronautics and related fields, as well as engineers, designers and others employed in the aerospace industry." One was James Zongker from the Boeing Co. Wichita plant. His sleek "X-21Bmk-5" recently set the Guinness indoor record for distance (164 ft. 4 in.). Another pro was Roland Mayer, chief engineer for General Electric's military space programs, whose "Beercan Bomber," carved out of a Miller Lite can, was disqualified because of its materials but still much admired. Commercial Pilot Anthony Martin of Talkeetna, Alaska, sent along 28 pages of instructions describing how to coax barrel rolls, chandelles and phugoid oscillations (downward arcs) from his two aerobatics entries, which were frugally folded from pink while-you-were-out message sheets.