By Buster Barkley, Hilarious.news lead reporter
The National Park Service is reserving part of Saturday for a form of aviation competition in which a precise crease can turn a family outing into a highly technical summit. Pearson Air Museum in Vancouver, Washington, is scheduled to host a free Pearson Museum and Airfield Celebration on August 15, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Among the event’s listed attractions: historic-aircraft displays, museum exhibits, community booths, walking tours, live music, a guest-author presentation, art and cultural activities—and a paper-airplane contest for children and families. In other words, an institution devoted to aviation history is making room for the aircraft class most likely to begin life on a kitchen table.
The Park Service describes the celebration as honoring 101 years of aviation history at Pearson Field. Its event listing does not announce a winner or a record, which is admirable restraint for a contest where someone will almost certainly insist that their wing-fold ratio was misunderstood by the wind.
A field with a long memory
Pearson’s runway history has considerably more drama than a sheet of copy paper. The National Park Service says the field was christened Pearson Air Field in 1925 and remains one of the country’s oldest continuously operating airfields. The Douglas World Cruisers stopped there in 1924, and a Soviet transpolar flight made an unplanned landing at the field in 1937 after an engine oil leak.
This weekend’s fleet of folded planes should have a less urgent relationship with engine oil, which is probably best for everyone. The museum is free year-round, according to the Park Service, and displays aircraft and artifacts from the early years of aviation.
For visitors, the program offers the unusual opportunity to stand near real aviation history and then submit a tiny, hand-folded rival to the atmosphere. Buster’s official reporting position is that a paper plane may weigh almost nothing, but it carries the full emotional freight of proving whose fold was correct.
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