Helicopters rely on a phenomenon called autorotation to slow their descent to the ground when they lose power. The air-flow past the rotors generated by the downward speed causes the rotor to spin and generate drag that slows down the fall. The paper helicopter is a simple construction that shares this property of autorotation when falling to the ground, and in the Approximation and Optimization in Engineering Design class, the objective was to build a paper helicopter that takes the longest to fall to the ground from a given height. In this project the objective is to validate the analytical model used to predict the fall time.
