In 2012, John Collins set the world record for the farthest flight by a paper aircraft. Thrown by football player Joe Ayoob, the glider, named “Suzanne,” after Collins’ wife, flew 226 feet, 10 inches (69.14 meters) before gracefully making its way into history.
Collins, a former television producer and director, left his TV career behind three years ago in order to focus full-time on using his planes to educate audiences.
He studied origami and aerodynamics and put those skills to use designing spectacular planes that perform tricks. He came up with a design for a boomerang plane, which loops through the air and returns to the launcher. Also notable is his bat plane, which eerily flaps its wings as it glides through the air.
Collins, who’s also known as the Paper Airplane Guy, has just published his fourth book about folding paper flyers. He also regularly performs demonstrations for students—from kindergarten to college—using his planes to teach them about science.
“I bring paper airplanes into classrooms and start talking about complicated ideas involved with fluid dynamics and using paper airplanes to explain it,” says Collins, who somehow makes terms like “dihedral angle” sound accessible to kids.
“If you can have a group of middle schoolers and high schoolers that don’t look at their phones for 45 minutes while you’re doing a demonstration, you’ve hit success,” he says.
In the below video John Collins explains how he Folds and Flies World Record Paper Airplanes
A paper plane, paper aeroplane (UK), paper airplane (US), paper glider, paper dart or dart is a toy aircraft, usually a glider made out of folded paper or paperboard.
The origin of folded paper gliders is generally considered to be of Ancient China, although there is equal evidence that the refinement and development of folded gliders took place in equal measure in Japan. Certainly, manufacture of paper on a widespread scale took place in China 500 BCE, and origami and paper folding became popular within a century of this period, approximately 460-390 BCE. It is impossible to ascertain where and in what form the first paper aircraft were constructed, or even the first paper plane’s form.
For over a thousand years after this, paper aircraft were the dominant man-made heavier-than-air craft whose principles could be readily appreciated, though thanks to their high drag coefficients, not of an exceptional performance when gliding over long distances. The pioneers of powered flight have all studied paper model aircraft in order to design larger machines.
