Welcome to Torrey Pines GullsJake Olefsky – Co-Modeler of the Year – 2025
Jake Olefsky is a local who grew up in Solana Beach. While attending Skyline Elementary School he enjoyed flying Estes model rockets, mainly with B or C engines. While attending Earl Warren Junior High, he began to be interested in paper airplanes, and very likely also built a Whitewings kit or two as the kits were popular at the time and had better performance than standard paper airplanes. Jake grew up with an interest in physics and STEM classes. He graduated from Torrey Pines High School in 1995.
Shortly thereafter he attended Stanford in the fall of 1995, intent on physics as his major. However, after one year, he changed his major to computer science. An exciting course in mechanical engineering changed his outlook and Jake attempted to change majors again, but didn’t have enough time. Jake finished his Bachelor’s degree in computer science in four years but stayed for a fifth year to add a minor in mechanical engineering. Officially he is the class of 1999 but he graduated in 2000 with his Bachelor’s degree. During his time at Stanford, he took only one course in aerospace engineering – it was a very math heavy course and it just didn’t jive with Jake’s interest at the time.
In 1999, Jake interned with a company called IDEO in Palo Alto. He worked in the toy invention studio which had a relationship with Estes model rockets. Jake was hired full time at IDEO after his graduation from Stanford and one of his tasks was making new products for Estes. One of his first products was a rocket that reported max altitude achieved (a rocket called Max Trax). At the time, accelerometers were too expensive, so this rocket made use of simple sensors to determine when the eject charge was released. A calibrated streamer and impact sensor determined time to ground. From these, reverse calculation could provide an estimate of the maximum altitude. Jake developed the prototype and electronics, conducted the flight tests, and saw it all the way to production. A follow-up model rocket, the Speed Freak, calculated max velocity with similar calculations but Jake was not directly involved in that effort.
Jake had also met his soon-to-be-wife as an undergrad at Stanford, and they married in the year 2001. She was accepted to the Cornish College of the Arts for a BFA and so together they moved to Seattle. While there, Jake started a new direction, inventing and developing new types of websites. No longer prototyping model rockets and toys, he was now brainstorming and inventing new websites. One in particular, braingle.com, has been going strong for over 25 years. Braingle publishes brain teasers, trivia and games with much of the content user-generated and edited by volunteers. He also developed Toodledo.com, an online productivity tool to help with tasks, note taking and collaboration. This grew into a small company with a website and apps for both iPhone and Android. Jake ran the company for 12 years from 2006 for 2018 and for a time it was the #1 app in the productivity section of the app store.
During this time, Jake also had two kids, a daughter in 2007 and a son in 2011. Entertaining them on the weekends became a regular thing and that’s when paper airplanes crept back into the game plan. Jake searched for paper airplane websites but really had no luck and those that were offered were terrible. He thought, “Why don’t I just build my own” and foldnfly.com was born. Over time, Jake bought many paper airplane books and turned Fold’NFly into a database of paper airplanes with articles about how to trim them and other activities that can be enjoyed. The website was initially slow to take off but it didn’t take long for it to become the #1 website on paper airplanes in Google rankings.
By 2022, Jake was looking to expand beyond folded paper airplanes. He remembered the Whitewings gliders from his youth but discovered that they were sadly no longer in production in the USA. He began collecting old Whitewings kits via eBay to study their designs and history. The Whitewings website was defunct but he emailed their contact for more information. A few years later he finally connected with the person, now retired, who ran the USA division for Whitewings. Soon Jake purchased the Whitewings website and relaunched whitewings.com as a museum of the history of Whitewings and their importance to the free flight community. Jake then wondered about selling downloadable plans for the Whitewings gliders – this required more investigation about trademarks and ownership. He eventually tracked down the original owners of Whitewings in Japan and over a period of several months negotiated a license to reproduce some of the kits. In 2025, Jake launched a Kickstarter program to fund the re-development and release of these kits in the USA.
During this same effort to re-brand Whitewings, Jake began exploring clubs in the San Diego Area involved with gliders. First, he found the San Diego Orbiteers – the main free flight club that operates both outdoors and indoors in the area. He joined and found it to be a fun club. What other clubs are in the area? A Google search turned up the Torrey Pines Gulls. And they happen to have a field in Encinitas very close to where Jake and his family live! Jake sent an email to inquire, and Cliff Hunter replied, inviting him to the next F3L Tow Hook contest at Encinitas. Upon arrival, Jake met Cliff, Chuck Norris, Gary Fogel and others and soon found himself going home with a Gentle Lady offered by Chuck as a gift. Jake flew this for a bit and then replaced it with a Medina. He also built a 1.5m Yellow Jacket (his first RC glider build) and just recently finished a mini-Gentle Lady. He also owns a Polires (thank you John McNeil), a UMX Radian, a Dream Flight Weasel, several foam combat wings, and a 1m Hawk DLG (thank you Bob Hirsch).
Jake is now a regular at the Encinitas Flight Center flying with the TPG. Occasionally, you’ll find him catapult launching a free flight glider or paper airplane just for fun. Or is that work? One never knows. But work should always be fun and anyone working in paper airplanes has the right idea of work/life balance.
Armed with his background in website design, in 2024-2025 Jake took the time to redesign the TPG website (this website). This was a considerable effort and required a whole new approach to the design itself. Working with previous webmaster Steve Hurd, each page was reviewed, and put into a different context, a new calendar page made, etc. with the goal of making the website both more accessible to the public but also more easily managed and updated by members of the TPG Executive Committee. Given all of his hard work to develop this new website for the Gulls, and for his efforts to revive the Whitewings gliders that many of us flew as kids, the TPG awarded Jake Olefsky with the Modeler of the Year trophy in 2025, an honor shared with Tom Farley that year. Thank you, Jake, for all you do for TPG!
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