The prize for throwing a paper plane the furthest in an international competition nearly four decades ago was a brand new 1985 Holden Camira.
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The International Newspaper Aeroplane Championships were hosted at Bruce, as reported in The Canberra Times on this day 36 years ago.
The winner of the Camira was Joe Carnovale, of Queanbeyan. There were 65 paper aeroplanes flown into the sunroof of the Camira.
In the end, it was down to Joe and Robert Keirven of Melba. In a tightly contested fly-off with Robert, Joe scraped home the winner by a margin of not much more than 90 centimetres.
Robert's consolation for not coming first was the prize of a trip for two with Qantas Airways to Los Angeles to see, among other things, Howard Hughes' mammoth wooden flying boat, the Spruce Goose
As in previous years, most of the entries were in the form of conventional paper darts but there was a special section for newspaper aeroplanes which showed imagination in design and flew the longest and most gracefully.
This was won by Paul Hermes, of Kambah, who won a holiday for two at the Greerimount Resort on the Gold Coast. Hundreds of 1985 T-shirts were distributed as prizes and, when these ran out, caps were distributed instead.
