How This Guy Folds and Flies World Record Paper Airplanes

[Narrator] There are paper airplanes,

and then there are John Collins' paper airplanes.

Marvels that return to sender, sideways and somersaulting.

A plane that seems to fly like a bat

and one that soars and soars.

I'm John Collins, the paper airplane guy.

[Narrator] For decades, Collins has been perfecting

the art and science of the paper airplane.

I just love figuring out how things fly.

There's a number of things you can watch fly

when you're a kid: insects to birds to full size planes.

They all fly using slightly different mechanisms

and that was just endlessly fascinating for me.

The idea that you could fold a flying machine

from this really modest resource, a piece of paper.

People are throwing it away by the tons,

you can grab a piece and reuse that

and make a flying machine out of it.

After going about as far as I could go folding planes,

I decided I needed to study this other field,

this art called origami.

I worked on that for about 10 years learning

what was to learn there and then took

all those folding techniques back to paper airplanes

with an idea towards making a set of really great

high performance planes that if all you had was paper,

you could make some high performance flying machines.

[Narrator] Collins makes one of the most high performance

paper airplanes.

Six years ago, he set a new world record for distance

by designing and folding

this astounding long distance glider.

It was thrown by quarterback Joe Ayoob.

[Collins] There it is, there it is.

We are all over that one.

That's gonna do it.

Get up there, get up there, get up there, get up there.

(cheering and applause)

We broke the distance record.

The old record was 207 feet, four inches

and we threw 226 feet 10 inches.

We were the first glider to break that 200 foot barrier,

to break out and set a distance record.

It had all been done with ballistic darts,

wings about this wide.

Our plane has really wide wings.

The old style, you'd throw at a 45 degree angle

and it would just crash into the finish line,

just a parabolic arc.

My plane takes nine seconds to do that

and so it's a real difference in approach.

If you watch the world record throw, it gets launch level,

climbs on its own, and then really flares and flies

for that last third.

It's a real flying machine.

As opposed to the ballistic dart,

it can just roll any direction and just kind of crash.

[Narrator] Collins stopped by the Wired studio

to fly the distance glider and some of the other planes

in his new book The World Record Paper Airplane

and to demonstrate how a humble piece of paper

can become any number of thrilling toys in minutes.

People always think I have top secret paper here.

All my planes are designed with regular old

eight and a half by 11, 20 pound paper in mind.

The basics are the basics: accurate folding,

line up the edges correctly, be really precise

about what you're doing.

Then, overall symmetry is super important.

This is gonna be the world record plane.

It's named after my wife, it's named Susanne.

It starts out with a couple of diagonal folds.

Short side of the paper up.

We're gonna take the top of the page

and put it against the side of the page.

We're gonna make two diagonal folds here.

Let's practice on the other side, shall we?

We're gonna move this corner over,

line up the top corner,

and then swing this guy into position.

As a double check, I can see

where my other diagonal is ending

and sweep down that way.

Now I've got nice, tight corners everywhere.

Nice, sharp creases.

We're gonna take the right hand edge

just from the crease corner down

to where this crease meets the edge of the page.

We're gonna lay it against the diagonal fold.

We're gonna take this creased corner

and bring it just to the end of this crease right here.

Fold the top down and now you'll see those diagonal folds

on the other side.

What you wanna do is line up the diagonal folds.

The top layer of the diagonal with the very bottom layer

of the diagonal on both sides

and that's how you know you're hitting

the center of the x dead center.

Let's follow the crease on both sides.

What I find to be the easiest way to do it

is to follow the creases on this side,

but if you can see them clearly on the other side

and that works for you, go ahead and use it flipped over.

We're gonna take this flap right here

and fold it up over those two corners.

When we do the next move to fold the plane in half,

the whole thing will be locked together.

Let's fold from the top all the way down

to the center of this edge to fold the plane in half.

You can flip it over.

Make sure the rear corners and the nose are perfect.

The center corners, don't worry so much about.

Don't spend a lot of time trying to line those guys up.

The rear corners and make sure

you're hitting the nose cleanly.

Now, here's the pro way to do it.

It makes your wings a little bit wider,

it makes the plane a more efficient glider.

If you start here and don't make the crease,

but see you've got a little triangle that you can see here

made up from this raw edge and the back of the fuselage.

If you keep pulling the wing down just until

that triangle disappears, that is a much better place

to make the wing crease.

It makes the tail much broader,

it gives you much better lifting characteristics.

Let's make the other wing match.

That should be an easy task.

The most important thing to remember is

that every flight is a test flight.

You're now a pilot, you're seeing if this thing flies,

you're making adjustments to it.

Most people think they can't fold a good plane,

but the reality is they just haven't adjusted a good plane.

The first thing we do, the wings are drooping like that,

we're gonna give it what's called positive dihedral angle.

Dihedral angle, that's just fancy words for the angle

the wings are stuck to the body of the plane.

What that does when you hold on to it

where all the layers lock and just lift the leading edge

of the wings, now you've got some upward sweep there.

What that does is put the lifting surface

up over where all the weight is,

so if the plane is flying along and it gets rocked

to one side, just like a pendulum, the weight swings back

underneath the wings, and that's called deadstick stability.

The other thing we're gonna do

aside from positive dihedral angle

is give the rear corners just a little upward bend.

Not a lot, and don't make a crease.

Just make a bend, you can always undo the bend,

flatten it out, or add a little bit more.

With all gliders, you're constantly

trading height for speed.

What do I mean by that?

If the center of gravity and the center of lift

were perfectly lined up, your plane would fly nice

and straight and drag would constantly be slowing it down

until it just fell out of the sky.

A stall is caused by too slow of an air speed

or too high an angle of attack.

That's where the wings are tilted up

with regard to the direction of airflow.

If you have a plane that's flying straight and level

and it's perfectly balanced,

eventually drag will slow it 'til it falls out of the sky.

How do you fix that with a glider?

With a power plane, you just hit the gas right?

Super simple.

With a glider, what you need to do is engineer

in the center of gravity a little bit in front of

the center of lift.

The center of gravity is the center of spin.

You can find that on any paper airplane simply

by spinning it.

You can see right where the center

of gravity is on that plane.

It's right here, you just watched it spin.

The center of spin is the center of gravity.

You've got all this lifting surface

behind the center of gravity,

so now the plane's gonna fly along,

the lift is back here, it pitches the nose downward

as the plane's going forward.

What does that do?

That allows me to gain speed.

The plane is being slowed, now I'm pointing the nose

at the ground gaining speed,

which is good but now I keep gaining speed

at 9.8 meters per second,

it's gonna crash in the ground really hard.

So I bend in some up elevator back here.

The air goes down, the top of the wing hits that bend,

gets kicked up, which pushes the tail down,

which lifts the nose and voila, now the nose is level again.

Enough up elevators so at the right speed,

the plane nose is up enough

to just achieve horizontal stability.

That's the whole trick with any glider.

You're constantly balancing that center of gravity,

center of lift, and a little bit of up elevator

to get that perfect flight.

[Narrator] But not all of Collins' planes

are about distance.

Some, like his boomerang models, are fun in smaller spaces

thanks to some interesting aerodynamics.

The boomerang plane, this one is great

because it'll circle either direction and it loops.

The basic trick with this one is that

the center of gravity is very close to the center of lift

so all you need to do is add just a tiny bit

of up elevator here.

The other thing has to do with something we talked

about before which is dihedral angle.

Most good planes have positive dihedral,

which gets the plane to rock back to neutral.

But the boomerang plane, the wings are drooping.

If I throw it leaned over, it does not self correct.

It stays leaned over.

Then you have to imagine what a climb

is gonna look like leaned over.

It's gonna look like a circle that way

or a circle that way or a loop.

It's all the same trick.

Then boomerang two, so this plane is made

to fly out, flip over, and fly back upside down.

It accomplishes that because it's really a failure

of a paper airplane.

I was trying to do landing gears on the boomerang one

and that's these guys here

and that puts too many layers towards the rear.

This is extremely tail heavy

and it does that crazy tip stall out there.

Flying out, positive dihedral on the way out.

After the stall, positive dihedral angle on the way back.

Toying again with all the adjusting

and bending the leading edge down a little bit

so when it's upside down, I'm getting a little scoop up

to help the nose come back.

Then I've got a little bit of up elevator here

to help magnify that crazy tip stall out there.

So it's this dance between what you do at the front

and the back to get it to fly perfectly both ways.

This is a really fun plane called the bat plane.

It was actually a design mistake.

It's not what I was going to make,

but it ended up doing something really weird

when I threw it for the first time,

the wings oscillate when you throw it.

What's actually happening is the plane is going

through a rapid series of stalls.

It's a little bit tail heavy

and I've got too much up elevator here

so it flies and stalls and as the body is flexible,

the wings flex upward.

At the top of the stall, no more pressure,

the wings relax and then it flies and stalls.

I wish I could tell you the secret sauce

to coming up with a new great paper airplane.

I have a couple of approaches and sometimes they overlap

and sometimes they don't.

Sometimes it's a design approach,

like I want to do a plane that has landing gear

or I want to do a plane that has a tunnel in the nose

or one that has a small wing in front.

So you bring the origami skills to bear on that.

You have to put in the time,

and that's what I would say to learn and compete

with a plane even as simple as this,

you do have to put the time in

to get to know the material and figure out how it works.

Obviously when it does exactly what you want,

it's really a cool feeling

that you've made this really great flying machine

out of just minimal materials.

It really doesn't matter if you don't get it back

in some cases.

It's the joy of that flight.

Yeah, I'm a kid at heart.

I am a four year old, a five year old once again

watching their plane just fly out of sight

and having a moment.

(laughing)

It's pretty fun.