Flying Ring’s Inventor Claims It’s an Airplane

The inventor of the Aerobie flying ring is crying foul to the sponsors of the Second Great International Paper Airplane Contest for denying victory to a cardboard version of his popular product.

Alan Adler, a lecturer at Stanford University, said Friday that he is sending a petition signed by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist and other aerodynamics experts to support his claim that the Aerobie fits the contest’s and the dictionary’s definition of an airplane.

Adler’s entry flew 194 feet, more than 50 feet farther than any of the other 5,000 entries from 23 countries, according to Ali Fujino of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, which sponsored the contest.

Disks in Separate Class

However, the judges decided that all flying disks would be put in a separate category, along with an origami golf ball that came with the instruction “throw really hard.”

Adler’s Aerobie glided so far that the judges decided it was “worthy of an award,” Fujino said. “It’ll be an honorable mention and it’ll be in the book we’re putting out.”

But that’s not good enough for Adler.

“Honorable mention does not recognize the fact that I designed the farthest-flying paper airplane in history,” he said.