FLYING MARVEL
Call it a supertoy. The X-zylo has amazed and inspired NASA scientists; yet it's a deceptively simple plastic toy. The X-zylo, a slim flying cylinder that's becoming a craze, flies faster than a Frisbee and farther than a football. The size of your fist, it weighs less than one ounce and has been thrown the length of two football fields. Its incredible flying properties may provide the basis for a new generation of aerospace technology.
The X-zylo was conceived when Baylor University student Mark Forti had a brainstorm while flying paper airplanes in his apartment. His dad was in the aerospace industry, and the two had a lifelong interest in airfoils. Forti knew the key to making an airfoil fly was to keep it flat on one side and curved on the other, like an airplane wing. "So I took a wing made of cardboard and bent it into a cylinder, using paper clips and tape to make one continuous wing. When I threw it with spin, it glided across the room."

After hundreds of prototypes, he learned how to throw it 150 feet. "I didn't know I had anything revolutionary; it was just a cool thing,'" remembers Forti. "So I took it to the engineering departments heads and asked, "How can I improve this based on what you know about how cylinders fly?"

And they said, "What" You mean cylinders fly?" Forti and his father went to General Dynamics, then to a wind tunnel at the NASA research center in Langley, VA. The experts shook their heads in disbelief.

"They said, 'Wow, so simple and so light, and you can throw it so far. Astonishing,'" recalls Forti. He quickly filed for a patent and started selling X-zylos at less than $10 a pop in June 1993. Mark's dad left his job as a General Dynamics executive to create the William Mark Corporation with his son. The company will sell X-zylos at 600 stores this year.

There are other applications for X-zylo. NASA is looking into its capabilities in exotic space weaponry - including projectiles that will fly faster than bullets.

It's a deceptively simple looking toy that can fly 600 feet. Thrown spirally like a football, the X-zylo becomes a flying gyroscope, resisting gravitational torque (force) and random air current torques. The cylinder's leading edge is thicker, so the upper and lower surfaces act as airfoils to provide lift.

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