Peanuts by Charles Schulz for July 26, 2015

Wrong, Lucille van Pelt: Charlie Brown can fold a paper airplane. The throwing of a paper airplane is what he cannot do.

Well he obviously has a penchant for balancing things on their head.

The type right beside Peanuts, some friends and I used to make those in sixth grade. We made tons of them and would fly them at recess, making various adjustments to the designs (like adding rudders to cause the plane to turn or elevators to cause them to climb or dive) and somehow I came up with one that had the affect of so badly disturbing the flow of air behind it that other planes would just crash no matter how well they flew (this included some of our best planes with the greatest glide time). That little plane wasn’t known for it’s glide time but in a race it would win every time if it got near another plane.

Had another group of boys decide they could make better planes than we did and even challenged us to a race. They used the classic dart design and were doing everything they could to give themselves an advantage, including stapling the planes to add more weight (something we only did with some of our largest as we discovered it didn’t work as well with the normal sized ones). You’ve got guys who for something like two or three months had been out playing with designs and improving things so the planes had better hang time, even if they weren’t the fastest vs. guys who threw theirs together in a couple of days. Needless to say while the darts were faster off the mark, any one of our best planes easily beat them for distance. Especially those they had staples in (and especially those they had the fuselage virtually full of staples since they crashed within a few feet of launch). And in the final race we pulled out my disruption plane. Took down all the darts and one of our other planes. Wouldn’t call it cheating since they said it was a joke that it’d make them crash and to go ahead and use it.

Curse you, Red Baron!

I’m reminded of this scene with Foghorn Leghorn and the egg headed kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH6V9A2RLQ4

Too much paper airplane flying, huh?

Paperplanehenge!

Wow..and Lucy is a doctor?

At least he can make the paper airplane. I can’t even do that!

Maybe Aeronautical Engineering isn’t in CB’s future!

Someone once said that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Maybe Charlie Brown should modify his design or the angle at which he throws them. Or both. Or some other factor. Or take up boating or model railroading since clearly he has a problem with flying things (paper planes, kites, baseballs).

I am not an aeronautical engineer, but I am able to make paper airplanes fly moderately well. However, I was visiting an air museum somewhere, and a guy outside the gift shop was demonstrating a styrofoam airplane with a wingspan of about 3 feet. He would toss the plane and catch it in the air when it returned after a nice flight. Time and time again, he would repeat this “trick”, so the bait was set and I bought one of the things in a kit form.

Upon returning home, I assembled my new plane, and after reading the instructions on how to achieve trick flights, I set my plane off only to see it smoothly rise, stall, and quickly return to earth about 50 feet away nose first!

Did you know styrofoam planes do not like hitting the ground nose first?

I preferred those “fortune tellers” you could make out of paper. Used to have a lot of fun with those!

xxx

He can crash paper airplanes.

The last panel reminds me of the “Graveyard of Lost Darts” on the White Sands bombing range where they drop the used gunnery target darts.

What Lucy should have said : “wow! Charlie Brown! how did you managed to make all the paper planes stand on their head, that too so neatly arranged in an array!”