Boomerang Architect

At the preseason tryouts for the U.S. Boomerang Team in Greenfield, Mass., one figure stands out among the hacky sack players and pizza delivery guys gathering in the soccer fields, limbering up their throwing arms.

Eric Darnell, a soft-spoken 62-year-old Quaker and backyard inventor from South Stafford, Vt., has brought 60 of his latest handmade boomerang prototypes, along with several notebooks, two windsocks and printouts of weather forecasts. While others just hurl their rangs -- as aficionados call them -- Darnell tries to be as meticulous and scientific as possible about the objects he refers to as "my kinetic sculptures."

When a boomerang won't soar, he adds extra weight here, shaves a wing there or drills a hole somewhere else to improve flight characteristics. When asked what he's doing, Darnell -- who has coached three U.S. teams -- explains with a blizzard of information about airfoil shapes, Reynolds numbers, local atmospheric conditions, wind shear and the effects of drag.

But he also acknowledges the role of art and intuition: "One of the things that is near and dear to my heart about boomerangs is that there's still some magic involved. You can't completely computerize them. I've seen computer-designed boomerangs, and they're junk. Sometimes, to fly well, a rang needs to be asymmetrical or unbalanced or off-center. It's counterintuitive; it's not in textbooks about airfoils." Plus, imperfections make a boomerang more fun. "When you see a rang made for maximum time aloft vibrating in the air, it just seems alive."

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