Started watching the video not planning on actually making it, saw that it is done with A4 paper and grabbed a random sheet at my desk to follow along. The pocket felt like a nice "a-ha!" moment. As someone who only knew the "naive" way to make paper airplanes from A4 paper, this is the best performing and prettiest paper airplane I've made in my life! It almost feels like it's not real how smoothly it stays straight in the air compared to all my paper airplanes in childhood.
Edit: Tried making the flapping wings AeroDactyl but it didn't work out :( wasn't aerodynamic and didn't flap its wings just went straight to the ground
Edit 2: Tried making the Jetstream (another 1 minute plane) and it came out well! Mine is INCREDIBLY asymmetrical and still flies better than any other plane I've made other than the Mystic!
Edit 3: Tried making the Advanced Elanus and I made it! But it's a little shoddy and much tougher for sure. Looks cool but it doesn't glide anywhere near as good as in the video (I guess you really need to perfect it.)
I've been making the original version of this, the Nakamura Lock, since seeing it in a book as a child. I messed with tons of "world record distance" designs as a kid but this design just always came out the most consistent and had great performance. My favorite part is just the simplicity of it.
> I messed with tons of "world record distance" designs as a kid
In seventh or right grade we had a paper airplane contest. I literally walked up to the throwing line holding an unfolded piece of paper. At the line I crumbled it up, it flew straighter and faster then any other airplane thrown that day, and I think only one or two airplanes beat it for distance. My appeal at being disqualified was rejected, though I broke no rules.
When my daughter and niece were 11 and 9, we had a paper airplane folding afternoon. We went through the handful of designs I remembered from middle school with some level of success. All along, I was teasing them about a super plane I knew how to make.I eventually made it and it flew so much better than all the other ones… but they hated me for it.
It turned out that they wanted paper planes that conformed to their idea of a paper plane, not paper-based engineering marvels.
I’ve pulled that trick multiple times, normally successfully; some people appreciate such shenanigans.
A similar anecdote. There was once a bridge-building competition, with provided materials, and scores for it bearing different weight toy cars, for height and for length. Nowhere was it said the bridge had to bear any of the cars. Our group’s 15-metre long roll of tape bridge with four-pop-stick-A-frame supports, which scored three times as much as the next (… and we could have doubled its length), was unceremoniously disqualified for unspecified grounds, as I had expected. I pressed for a few days for the grounds (even suggesting the couple of not-unreasonable grounds I had thought of, such as that our team had schismed into two over the creative direction), but was not given them.
The unwritten rules about spirit can be applied capriciously.
I think ours was still the most popular bridge. And honestly one of the more realistic, just scaled for much smaller vehicles, a consistent 1:500 where most were an inconsistent 1:25 to 1:50. They were really good supports.
The Nakamura Lock - thank you for the name! - that's the one I learned when I was a child in Russia in early 1990's - I thought this was the default way to make an paper airplane.
This has been my go-to design since the 1980s but I never knew what it was called. Easy to build, consistently good flight characteristics. And you can slightly bend the "elevons" to get different flight patterns.
How do you find the exact dimensions for your Nakamura Lock? I have to estimate some of the critical dimensions, so it's always a surprise whether each plane will pitch too far upwards or downwards.
Sadly I don’t remember the title. It was a red boarder around white in a paperback book. I had it for awhile as an adult but I’m not sure if it survived my last move.
Edit: https://a.co/d/09I0VuLM this was one of the books. No affiliate link. ISBN-13 is 978-0761143833
For half of the video I was thinking this was the airplane I learned to do in my childhood but later on I saw the nice final tweaks, its very nice given the time you put.
What is the objection here? What is the waste? In sharing it, no one else has to prompt an LLM to create that page. If it weren't shared, that would be worse!
I have a story to share. In 1978 as a preteen, my mother made me take piano lessons. God bless her for trying. Anyway, while waiting for my class in the lobby of the music school, I would often make paper airplanes. One day, an older gentleman came over and said that he wanted to gift me something. What he gave me was his copy of "The great international paper airplane book". And remains one of my cherished books or really possessions. But I'm getting older now and feel that the time has come for me to find a 13-year-old worthy of this gift. But it's quite a leap of faith, for me anyway, to convey such a gift.
The author, Felix Rosenthal, was a family friend. He had an incredible life, like something out of "The Third Man":
Born on January 12, 1917 in Munich, Felix emigrated from Germany in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, and settled with part of his family in his mother's native Florence; after obtaining his Italian high-school degree ("licenza liceale") he went on to study engineering at the Istituto Politecnico in Milan, but when the Fascists' anti-semitic laws of 1938 prohibited Jews from enrolling in public schools and universities, he settled in Paris, again with part of his family. At the outbreak of WWII in September 1939, Felix was in Switzerland and a return to France was impossible; in 1940 he emigrated to Chile before finally settling in Berkeley to join his brother Bernard in 1941, and enrolling in the engineering school of the University of California. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the US Army and became one of "The Ritchie Boys" - GIs of German origin who spoke German natively and were trained in Military Intelligence at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. He was discharged with the rank of Master Sergeant and returned to the University of California to study architecture; after having obtained his MA he became assistant to Eric Mendelsohn, the renowned architect who had recently joined Berkeley's Architecture Department.
We had the original book when I was a kid. My wife gave me a copy (off of AbeBooks or somewhere) a few years ago and I was a bit overcome with emotion at seeing it again.
In first grade, visible from my assigned lunch seat in the cafeteria, was a yellowing paper airplane on top of an exposed ventilation duct. It was there for a few years, too.
I have a similar story. I opened a drawer at my grandma's place and found an old copy of "The World Record Paper Airplane Book" that had been there for years. I folded airplanes for years and years. Even as a grown-up, I impressed some people by throwing a long-flighted plane into a stadium field while waiting for a concert.
I have a copy of this!! It is one of my favorite books on paper airplanes. Great designs, great layout… I’ve occasionally tried modifying some of them to be made out of balsa with various levels of success.
I just don't know if it would work well as a library book, since the pages are meant to be cut out and folded up into planes. Of course, a responsible child would refrain from doing so and just copy the designs onto their own sheets of paper.
"The Ultimate Paper Airplane: With Step-by Step Instructions for Seven Different Models" by Richard Kline and Floyd Fogleman are my goto book to show people.
Unfortunately needs a bit of tape usually for most of the models. But great book.
A friend of mine his uncle bought him a copy. We proceeded to make all of them. Came across a funny thing if you clip a clothspin on the tip of the one the cover it goes wildly further than it should. Even without it goes pretty far.
That paperclip might have more mass than the actual paper. You can stuff a lot more energy into that throw while adding negligible drag. And you are moving the center of mass to a position which favours more stable flight as well.
I was reminded of this book immediately! A savior for a boring afternoon. It was like knowing how to tie elaborate knots. You learned some killer designs that made you king of the paper airplane at school.
Yup. In 7th grade during recess we made airplanes. One day I made a Barnaby and threw it up in the air. It caught an updraft and just disappeared into the clouds. With that, I became a paper airplane legend at school.
Hi everyone! I'm Kyle — the creator behind Foldable Flight (the website linked in the original post). It's very fun to read these comments and to hear about your experience using the site and folding the planes featured on it! I've been designing paper airplanes since I was a child, and have shared many of my designs freely through my website and on YouTube. Foldable Flight also features planes from many other designers, including the world record planes for distance and time aloft.
Please comment with any feedback you have regarding the site. I hope to improve its existing features and to add additional features in the future.
Hey man just wanted to say thank you, my kid loves your channel/patreon. He spends _hours_ folding planes, mixing up and iterating designs. Every corner of the house is filled with discarded planes.
The reappearing sheet asking me to subscribe to some newsletter is incredibly annoying. And it seems that it sometimes refreshes the website when I close it?
Who of the first time visitors would even want to subscribe to such a thing before seeing pretty much any content? Does it have a reasonable conversion?
Can you point international folks to Amazon or other sellers? The postage is expensive (more than the book) Was going to give up but then found Amazon had it for £7 postage or ‘free’ with prime.
I really enjoyed your designs for the PowerUp flight thing. What kinds of designs adapt best to that “platform”? Do you find that it opens up possibilities that are unviable when used for unpowered flight? Are there any design decisions that you tend to make for the Powerup that you don’t usually make for your unpowered planes?
When I would visit my grandmother as a kid, my parents wouldn't let me bring a game console with me, and she lived in the middle of nowhere so I would get bored pretty easily.
One summer, I had brought a book on how to make different paper airplanes. My grandmother had this huge crate of dot matrix printer paper [1] that I was given freedom to use to my heart's content.
I made hundreds of planes, of varying quality. I even did quasi-scientific tests to see which ones would fly farther, and I used a rubber band extended to the same length each time to try and ensure I was applying roughly the same amount of force in each launch.
I look back at that time pretty fondly. It was the only time in my life that I actually had fun visiting my grandmother's house.
[1] Even at the time this was somewhat outdated; she had a normal inkjet printer at the time so the paper was basically useless as printer paper.
Adding my own story: Foldable Flight, the YouTube channel, is what allowed me to cope with Covid lockdowns with a five year old; every day we would sit together for at least an hour and fold increasingly sophisticated paper aeroplanes together.
My son is now 11 and he still folds, has mastered advanced origami skills, and also has organised four yearly paper aeroplane competitions. All down to Kyle Boyer and his Foldable Flight channel.
This is Kyle! Thanks for your kind words! I just discovered this website because my website (Foldable Flight) has been getting an insane amount of traffic today because of this post. I hope you and your son continue to love paper airplanes and explore creativity together :-)
My dad worked overtime in the evening a fair bit. He'd often bring me when I was a young teen. The building was several stories tall with a huge open central core, just a flight of stairs on one end.
I'd go to the top floor, take a bunch of paper from the printer room and fold planes, and send them out into the central space. Go back, tweak the design or try something new, launch again.
Don't think I came up with any good designs, but I had a lot of fun trying various ideas.
I was way into paper airplanes in 8th grade and used to fly them onto the roof of the rectory next door when the teacher was out of the room. I'm looking forward to trying some of these and see how they compare.
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator behind FoldableFlight.com. I don't run any ads on my website. Are you saying you can't see content on FoldableFlight.com while running an ad blocker?
Yeah, it is easy to try to correct the situation as an adult afterwards. This was just an account of my feelings then.
And as I mentioned below - maybe exactly this was in the way from making the best paper plane ever, that could fly all the way to my neighbour? What did I know?
I sort of had the same issue, eventually went to a small local printing company.
They had loads of scrap paper in all possible colours.
They were very nice to me (I was a kid so that helps I guess), and I got a load of scrap paper for free. They even cut a lot of it in square size.
This supply lasted me for many many years of folding pleasure.
My technique was always 1) fold along the line you want to cut (makes it straight—maybe parallel if you have a good eye), 2) use your tongue to wet the creased edge, 3) open and re-fold along the same crease but for the opposite side (valley becomes mountain fold), 4) wet the creased edge again… It was easy enough to tear along the fold at that point.
The instructions were just there and I was certain it was the best plane ever if I just had the right paper format. And that they failed had nothing to do with my folding skills.
My son has created hundreds of planes based on this site and the associated book. He absolutely loves it! For what it's worth, Kyle is a friend and gave us the book.
I see a number of folks questioning whether this is AI slop. I can personally attest to Kyle's work being very real. He has been doing this for many years. I've attended a few of his face-to-face folding lessons and had a lot of fun folding and flying these planes.
I couldn’t use the website because closing the “sign up for our email list” does a full page refresh. Then it popped up again even though I had already dismissed it. When I tried dismissing it a second time the pate crashed.
This just unlocked a memory for me. Circa 1996 or so, when my family got our first household computer, there was a... Game, or app, some sort of software that taught me how to make paper airplanes. I loved that thing. I made a bunch of crappy paper airplanes and found I loved folding stuff. I later discovered origami, and later papercrafts.
Nothing will ever replace Campbell Morris' Advanced Paper Aircraft Construction volumes 1-3 (or was it 4) for me, but this looks modern and ideal for young and aspiring ballistic cellulose aeronautical engineers.
Hi! I'm Kyle Boyer — the creator behind FoldableFlight.com and the associated YouTube channel. My website offers similar functionality to FoldNFly, but a completely different (and more extensive) library of planes, including the world record designs for distance and time aloft!
I think I owe you an apology, because my question was real, but worded in a way that wasn't very constructive. The answer is clearly that it's not a reskin. Thanks for taking the time to reply (and create an account).
In middle school I would compete in the South Florida Science Museum's egg drop, bridge, and paper airplane competitions.
A formative experience was losing the plane toss to a jock who entered only in that event, folded a few 'standard' airplanes, and fired off a few practice shots modeling the official throwing conditions (fixed elbow on a bench at kneeling height) before taking first place with a fresh plane.
I've always been more partial to the Ring Wing paper plane https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/the-ring-... Easy to make, has a stable flight profile, and is relatively hard to damage as the reinforced leading edge is the typical impact site.
That's a cool website. Is there a benchmark for these? I noticed some of these have scores ("Flies over x feet!") and some don't.
Mostly I'm just curious, how well does the standard crappy paper airplane fly, which every kid makes in school, how well does it fly relative to some of these world record winners? (Some of which have a lot more folds and measuring and tape than I was expecting!)
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator of FoldableFlight.com and the designer of many of the paper airplanes on it. I'd estimate that the standard "classic dart" paper airplane flies about 20 to 30 feet (less than 10 meters). Many of the paper airplanes on my website (even some easy ones) can be thrown over 100 feet (30ish meters). The world record design for distance can fly over 300 feet, though it requires cutting and a bit of tape.
Cool! I had "The World Record Paper Airplane Book" when I was a kid and loved it. Sorry to see so many on here had to deal with paper mismatches. Fortunately The World Record Paper Airplane Book came with colorful paper for each plane you could tear out of the back.
In the late 1960s as a 3rd grader I was fascinated with the paper airplanes made by the older students during recess. At one point I came across an plane that had been left on the field and reverse engineered it. It was not until decades later that I actually saw the Nakamura Lock instructions in print. It has been a joy to show at least three generations of children how to make this plane. It flys well, is reasonably robust, and just a joy to make and play with. I recall my younger brother and I flying them at night at my parents house, just having a nice summer evening of simple play.
My parents subscribed to several magazines when I was a kid and any time a new one arrived I would shake out the subscription signup mail cards and make paper airplanes. They were small but something about the thickness of the paper made it very satisfying to fold and the planes fly very well.
I guess those cards must still exist but it has been ages since I have read a real magazine. I had a couple of dumb subscriptions in college but do not think I have ever had any since. Should consider it for our kids and to get me off my phone.
No mention of The Klutz Book of Paper Airplanes
Book by Doug Stillinger? I don't recognize any of these new names but the designs look similar to the ones in Stillinger's book. The hammer in that book used to be the airplane which at some point won WR for furthest flight.
It would be nicer if the paper used in the videos were different color on each side. Maybe even checkered?
I folded the Vanguard (https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/vanguard), can attest that it’s relatively easy, looks great (kiddo loves it) and flies better than any plane I have previously folded.
Somewhat off-topic, but this summer I was at a conference where Lufthansa was a vendor and had a contest: Whoever could take their brochure for working in their engineering group and turn it into an airplane that flys at least 10 meters got a Lufthansa plushie.
The person who got the farthest got some extra prize. I wish I'd know about this resource then!
Click on the first design, only way to learn how to fold is with a 10 minute YouTube video with plenty of the usual padding to get it to 10 minutes+ and "if you don't have the template" spread throughout.
So basically just buy the $35 worth of books and templates they're selling if you actually want to do this instead of playing and pausing a YT video a hundred times to get through this.
I think I'll fire up Publisher '97 and relive my paper plane memories.
Play the youtube video. You don't know what you're saying.
I used to spend a lot of time with origami books. They didn't have videos. You could consume the information as quickly as you wanted.
Unless, of course, you couldn't do that because the instructions were completely inscrutable. That happened a lot. More the rule than the exception, really.
Videos solve so many problems in this context. They would have saved me hours of confusion. Why would you complain that the free instructions are superior to the instructions you can pay for?
Come on! They're selling you books in the $20 range and using free (if slightly tedious) videos to promote said books in a polite and non-pushy way. I can't believe this upsets people!
Love these types of businesses. Do one thing great, consistently, and be nearly obsessive. Deliver the primary value (the joy of exploring paper airplane designs through tutorial videos) for free, but make it super easy for people to buy the upgrade (a sweet book of paper airplanes with cool paper designs).
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator of FoldableFlight.com and the designer of many of the paper airplanes in its database. Thanks for your kind words! Obsessive is certainly a fair description of me :-)
Yes. Personal anecdote. I won the 1978 UCLA paper airplane contest by exactly this method.
There was a good design floating around (locally?) called a Pasquali [1]. In the couple of hours before the contest. I folded about a dozen of the design and tested them. The individual plane that flew best is the one that I flew in the contest.
(If you happen to know the UCLA campus, the plane was launched from the top of Boelter Hall -- about 3 floors up from memory. It flew all the way across the Engineering Quad to the raised courtyard between the Geology and Chemistry buildings.)
[1] If anybody here happens to know of this design, I've forgotten all of the details other than the name. I'd love to recover it! Sadly, the actual paper airplane is long lost.
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator of the website. I'm not proficient in web design.
What would it require for the mail popup to be remembered on refresh so you don't have to keep clicking off of it? I'd be happy to update that feature.
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator of Foldable Flight. No AI has been used to make the site. The "some reason" behind the doubled "intermediate" toggle was human error (mine) in the CMS input for one of the planes. It's fixed now!
wow this is soo cool! Awesome work. When I was a kid I dreamed of selling such instructions and paper to others! Immediately bought your book so I can build some with my kids now. Thank you!
My son watched a ton of this at age ~8 or so. He built some really crazy stuff from memory and our house was full of great designs for like a year. Pretty great channel imo.
Scrolled down the page, saw this "Very Easy" 1 minute plane
https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/mystic
Started watching the video not planning on actually making it, saw that it is done with A4 paper and grabbed a random sheet at my desk to follow along. The pocket felt like a nice "a-ha!" moment. As someone who only knew the "naive" way to make paper airplanes from A4 paper, this is the best performing and prettiest paper airplane I've made in my life! It almost feels like it's not real how smoothly it stays straight in the air compared to all my paper airplanes in childhood.
Edit: Tried making the flapping wings AeroDactyl but it didn't work out :( wasn't aerodynamic and didn't flap its wings just went straight to the ground
Edit 2: Tried making the Jetstream (another 1 minute plane) and it came out well! Mine is INCREDIBLY asymmetrical and still flies better than any other plane I've made other than the Mystic!
Edit 3: Tried making the Advanced Elanus and I made it! But it's a little shoddy and much tougher for sure. Looks cool but it doesn't glide anywhere near as good as in the video (I guess you really need to perfect it.)
Final edit: My planes :) https://i.imgur.com/xnMdzJv.jpeg
I've been making the original version of this, the Nakamura Lock, since seeing it in a book as a child. I messed with tons of "world record distance" designs as a kid but this design just always came out the most consistent and had great performance. My favorite part is just the simplicity of it.
When my daughter and niece were 11 and 9, we had a paper airplane folding afternoon. We went through the handful of designs I remembered from middle school with some level of success. All along, I was teasing them about a super plane I knew how to make.I eventually made it and it flew so much better than all the other ones… but they hated me for it.
It turned out that they wanted paper planes that conformed to their idea of a paper plane, not paper-based engineering marvels.
Apparently, that design is called "two loops".
I’ve pulled that trick multiple times, normally successfully; some people appreciate such shenanigans.
A similar anecdote. There was once a bridge-building competition, with provided materials, and scores for it bearing different weight toy cars, for height and for length. Nowhere was it said the bridge had to bear any of the cars. Our group’s 15-metre long roll of tape bridge with four-pop-stick-A-frame supports, which scored three times as much as the next (… and we could have doubled its length), was unceremoniously disqualified for unspecified grounds, as I had expected. I pressed for a few days for the grounds (even suggesting the couple of not-unreasonable grounds I had thought of, such as that our team had schismed into two over the creative direction), but was not given them.
The unwritten rules about spirit can be applied capriciously.
I think ours was still the most popular bridge. And honestly one of the more realistic, just scaled for much smaller vehicles, a consistent 1:500 where most were an inconsistent 1:25 to 1:50. They were really good supports.
The Nakamura Lock - thank you for the name! - that's the one I learned when I was a child in Russia in early 1990's - I thought this was the default way to make an paper airplane.
Oh wow, this is the standard (and only) type that all kids in Fiji learn how to make. I never knew the name.
Same. Yet another USSR thing that was apparently a ripoff :)
This has been my go-to design since the 1980s but I never knew what it was called. Easy to build, consistently good flight characteristics. And you can slightly bend the "elevons" to get different flight patterns.
How do you find the exact dimensions for your Nakamura Lock? I have to estimate some of the critical dimensions, so it's always a surprise whether each plane will pitch too far upwards or downwards.
I've always just eyeballed it and it works out. It seems like a pretty forgiving design.
Same. Taught my kids to make it, too, and they are always confused as to why everyone doesn't make them this way at school.
> seeing it in a book as a child
Kids' Shenanigans by Klutz?
Sadly I don’t remember the title. It was a red boarder around white in a paperback book. I had it for awhile as an adult but I’m not sure if it survived my last move.
Edit: https://a.co/d/09I0VuLM this was one of the books. No affiliate link. ISBN-13 is 978-0761143833
Edit 2: it was this one! https://www.booktopia.com.au/worlds-greatest-paper-airplane-...
I saw the Nakamura Lock in a different Klutz book, titled "The Klutz Book of Paper Airplanes".
Why fold the nose?
I've been making this version since I was a kid, but never folded the nose.
Is it to help keep the spine together?
Wow, just made one. She flies very smooth!
I haven't made a plane in a long time, so I don't have much frame of reference.
But for comparison I tried making another one, a "naive" plane the way I used to, and it just "reverse nosedived" straight into the ceiling.
He is probably using the US Letter format.
https://papersizes.io/compare/a-a4-vs-us-letter
> https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/mystic
For half of the video I was thinking this was the airplane I learned to do in my childhood but later on I saw the nice final tweaks, its very nice given the time you put.
Is there a way to see the instructions for it?
I also seem to have huge problems seeing anything on the site both using cromite and ironfox.
Cromite is barely maintained, I switched to Titanium.
The page embeds this instruction video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ocKG4Ymm5o
I guess the written instructions are included in the ebook sold on the same website.
Ah, annoying. At least it's short, I don't have to put up with him yattering away in some foreign language for too long.
Took less than ten minutes: https://mystic-paper-plane-guide.ftyqeebp.chatgpt.site/
And how much energy did it waste, for which benefit exactly?
Watch the video once and follow along, you'll know how to do it.
What is the objection here? What is the waste? In sharing it, no one else has to prompt an LLM to create that page. If it weren't shared, that would be worse!
I did, but I don't understand what the guy is saying, in case it's important.
I hope it wasted a lot of energy, I pay good money for that subscription.
looks identical to a paper airplane I was making 40+ years ago. fuzzy if any tiny diffs or not
I have a story to share. In 1978 as a preteen, my mother made me take piano lessons. God bless her for trying. Anyway, while waiting for my class in the lobby of the music school, I would often make paper airplanes. One day, an older gentleman came over and said that he wanted to gift me something. What he gave me was his copy of "The great international paper airplane book". And remains one of my cherished books or really possessions. But I'm getting older now and feel that the time has come for me to find a 13-year-old worthy of this gift. But it's quite a leap of faith, for me anyway, to convey such a gift.
https://archive.org/details/greatinternation00jerr/mode/1up
The author, Felix Rosenthal, was a family friend. He had an incredible life, like something out of "The Third Man":
Born on January 12, 1917 in Munich, Felix emigrated from Germany in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, and settled with part of his family in his mother's native Florence; after obtaining his Italian high-school degree ("licenza liceale") he went on to study engineering at the Istituto Politecnico in Milan, but when the Fascists' anti-semitic laws of 1938 prohibited Jews from enrolling in public schools and universities, he settled in Paris, again with part of his family. At the outbreak of WWII in September 1939, Felix was in Switzerland and a return to France was impossible; in 1940 he emigrated to Chile before finally settling in Berkeley to join his brother Bernard in 1941, and enrolling in the engineering school of the University of California. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the US Army and became one of "The Ritchie Boys" - GIs of German origin who spoke German natively and were trained in Military Intelligence at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. He was discharged with the rank of Master Sergeant and returned to the University of California to study architecture; after having obtained his MA he became assistant to Eric Mendelsohn, the renowned architect who had recently joined Berkeley's Architecture Department.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/felix-r...
We had the original book when I was a kid. My wife gave me a copy (off of AbeBooks or somewhere) a few years ago and I was a bit overcome with emotion at seeing it again.
That is a wonderful background story. Thank you for sharing it!
Both your comment and shermantanktop's are touching contributions and I've put them both in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights.
I occasionally add a comment when we do this, in the hope that people will learn about it and send us nominations! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
In first grade, visible from my assigned lunch seat in the cafeteria, was a yellowing paper airplane on top of an exposed ventilation duct. It was there for a few years, too.
I have a similar story. I opened a drawer at my grandma's place and found an old copy of "The World Record Paper Airplane Book" that had been there for years. I folded airplanes for years and years. Even as a grown-up, I impressed some people by throwing a long-flighted plane into a stadium field while waiting for a concert.
I have a copy of this!! It is one of my favorite books on paper airplanes. Great designs, great layout… I’ve occasionally tried modifying some of them to be made out of balsa with various levels of success.
I'd advise donating to a library if you could fine one. It is difficult to find someone with the aptitude.
I just don't know if it would work well as a library book, since the pages are meant to be cut out and folded up into planes. Of course, a responsible child would refrain from doing so and just copy the designs onto their own sheets of paper.
Library will just sell it in their book sale.
That likely will make sure it goes to someone who cares about it, for what it's worth.
yes. most libraries do not actually accept donations for circulation, so ask before you donate
"The Ultimate Paper Airplane: With Step-by Step Instructions for Seven Different Models" by Richard Kline and Floyd Fogleman are my goto book to show people.
Unfortunately needs a bit of tape usually for most of the models. But great book.
A friend of mine his uncle bought him a copy. We proceeded to make all of them. Came across a funny thing if you clip a clothspin on the tip of the one the cover it goes wildly further than it should. Even without it goes pretty far.
That paperclip might have more mass than the actual paper. You can stuff a lot more energy into that throw while adding negligible drag. And you are moving the center of mass to a position which favours more stable flight as well.
I was reminded of this book immediately! A savior for a boring afternoon. It was like knowing how to tie elaborate knots. You learned some killer designs that made you king of the paper airplane at school.
Yup. In 7th grade during recess we made airplanes. One day I made a Barnaby and threw it up in the air. It caught an updraft and just disappeared into the clouds. With that, I became a paper airplane legend at school.
Wow! As a kid I borrowed this book from my local library again and again over a couple years. So many good planes in there.
Thanks for reminding me of it
Hi everyone! I'm Kyle — the creator behind Foldable Flight (the website linked in the original post). It's very fun to read these comments and to hear about your experience using the site and folding the planes featured on it! I've been designing paper airplanes since I was a child, and have shared many of my designs freely through my website and on YouTube. Foldable Flight also features planes from many other designers, including the world record planes for distance and time aloft.
Please comment with any feedback you have regarding the site. I hope to improve its existing features and to add additional features in the future.
Hey man just wanted to say thank you, my kid loves your channel/patreon. He spends _hours_ folding planes, mixing up and iterating designs. Every corner of the house is filled with discarded planes.
His box of kept planes: https://imgur.com/a/2HW8tC2
Hi!
The reappearing sheet asking me to subscribe to some newsletter is incredibly annoying. And it seems that it sometimes refreshes the website when I close it?
Who of the first time visitors would even want to subscribe to such a thing before seeing pretty much any content? Does it have a reasonable conversion?
The planes seem cool though!
Not sometimes, every time. It’s obnoxious.
Your site seems super interesting but it’s unusable on mobile (iOS), it keeps prompting newsletter stuff and crashing.
Can you point international folks to Amazon or other sellers? The postage is expensive (more than the book) Was going to give up but then found Amazon had it for £7 postage or ‘free’ with prime.
I really enjoyed your designs for the PowerUp flight thing. What kinds of designs adapt best to that “platform”? Do you find that it opens up possibilities that are unviable when used for unpowered flight? Are there any design decisions that you tend to make for the Powerup that you don’t usually make for your unpowered planes?
Thanks!
Your site is buggy af on mobile safari to the point of being unusable.
When I would visit my grandmother as a kid, my parents wouldn't let me bring a game console with me, and she lived in the middle of nowhere so I would get bored pretty easily.
One summer, I had brought a book on how to make different paper airplanes. My grandmother had this huge crate of dot matrix printer paper [1] that I was given freedom to use to my heart's content.
I made hundreds of planes, of varying quality. I even did quasi-scientific tests to see which ones would fly farther, and I used a rubber band extended to the same length each time to try and ensure I was applying roughly the same amount of force in each launch.
I look back at that time pretty fondly. It was the only time in my life that I actually had fun visiting my grandmother's house.
[1] Even at the time this was somewhat outdated; she had a normal inkjet printer at the time so the paper was basically useless as printer paper.
Adding my own story: Foldable Flight, the YouTube channel, is what allowed me to cope with Covid lockdowns with a five year old; every day we would sit together for at least an hour and fold increasingly sophisticated paper aeroplanes together.
My son is now 11 and he still folds, has mastered advanced origami skills, and also has organised four yearly paper aeroplane competitions. All down to Kyle Boyer and his Foldable Flight channel.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you Kyle!
Hi Anon,
This is Kyle! Thanks for your kind words! I just discovered this website because my website (Foldable Flight) has been getting an insane amount of traffic today because of this post. I hope you and your son continue to love paper airplanes and explore creativity together :-)
My dad worked overtime in the evening a fair bit. He'd often bring me when I was a young teen. The building was several stories tall with a huge open central core, just a flight of stairs on one end.
I'd go to the top floor, take a bunch of paper from the printer room and fold planes, and send them out into the central space. Go back, tweak the design or try something new, launch again.
Don't think I came up with any good designs, but I had a lot of fun trying various ideas.
I was way into paper airplanes in 8th grade and used to fly them onto the roof of the rectory next door when the teacher was out of the room. I'm looking forward to trying some of these and see how they compare.
Wouldn't have expected 40min video to fold an airplane: https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/lancer!
And they dont even throw it at the end...I guess these are real aircraft engineers
@2:13, there's some test flight (?) that looks engineer-ish
They throw it in the beginning at 2:13
Related: "https://www.foldnfly.com/"
21.jul.2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36784032 25 comments
26.may.2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087442 76 comments
18.jul.2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134691 96 comments
06.dec.2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466325 8 comments
16.jun.2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23545860 8 comments
18.oct.2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18249755 206 comments
Thanks! https://foldnfly.com is so much better than the spammy nonsense linked in tfa.
That site completely blocks you if you use an Adblock though.
For me it is just the opposite: foldnfly shows, while I see no content on foldablefly
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator behind FoldableFlight.com. I don't run any ads on my website. Are you saying you can't see content on FoldableFlight.com while running an ad blocker?
I am using cromite and ironfox on android and I cannot see much except for the shopping link for the different planes: https://imgur.com/a/omEPIyx
They both have adblockers enabled: no clue if that is the root cause though.
Looked pretty good until the anti-ad-blocker message blocked the entire content of the site.
Doesn't happen with ublock origin.
I had a book for this when I was a kid, but since I lived in Europe, all I had was A4 format paper and most models were for Letter or folio format!
Obviously the book was translated from US.
I don't remember how bad it was in practice but I remember it made me sad.
How I felt not having square origami paper as a kid.
(It's okay, I learned immediately how to rectify, uh, squarify, the situation.)
Yeah, it is easy to try to correct the situation as an adult afterwards. This was just an account of my feelings then.
And as I mentioned below - maybe exactly this was in the way from making the best paper plane ever, that could fly all the way to my neighbour? What did I know?
I sort of had the same issue, eventually went to a small local printing company. They had loads of scrap paper in all possible colours. They were very nice to me (I was a kid so that helps I guess), and I got a load of scrap paper for free. They even cut a lot of it in square size. This supply lasted me for many many years of folding pleasure.
That's super cool.
My mom was a secretary and so brought home typing paper for me.
When I was older, dumpster diving netted me 4 or 5 reams of typing paper (with a letterhead on one side—oh well).
Was getting your parents to explain proportion and take scissors to a sheet not an option?
Interestingly, paper A4 wide (210mm?) by letter tall (11") is a thing in the TeX community.
Cutting paper is annoying to get straight without a paper cutter.
That a4 x 11" document size prints correctly on A4 or letter without scaling or cropping (the margins just change)
Squaring is at least pretty easy. Fold diagonally, fold where the edge crosses the paper, crease back-and-forth until it tears easily.
> take scissors to a sheet not an option?
My experience is that it is quite difficult to cut the sheet precisely enough if you just use a normal pair of scissors.
My technique was always 1) fold along the line you want to cut (makes it straight—maybe parallel if you have a good eye), 2) use your tongue to wet the creased edge, 3) open and re-fold along the same crease but for the opposite side (valley becomes mountain fold), 4) wet the creased edge again… It was easy enough to tear along the fold at that point.
Obviously just an anecdote.
The instructions were just there and I was certain it was the best plane ever if I just had the right paper format. And that they failed had nothing to do with my folding skills.
My son has created hundreds of planes based on this site and the associated book. He absolutely loves it! For what it's worth, Kyle is a friend and gave us the book.
I see a number of folks questioning whether this is AI slop. I can personally attest to Kyle's work being very real. He has been doing this for many years. I've attended a few of his face-to-face folding lessons and had a lot of fun folding and flying these planes.
I couldn’t use the website because closing the “sign up for our email list” does a full page refresh. Then it popped up again even though I had already dismissed it. When I tried dismissing it a second time the pate crashed.
This just unlocked a memory for me. Circa 1996 or so, when my family got our first household computer, there was a... Game, or app, some sort of software that taught me how to make paper airplanes. I loved that thing. I made a bunch of crappy paper airplanes and found I loved folding stuff. I later discovered origami, and later papercrafts.
Fun stuff :)
Feeling nostalgia, too. From a quick search it looks like The Greatest Paper Airplanes :)
EDIT: this is the one for me https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-greatest-paper-airpla...
YES! That's the one! Thanks for finding it :)
Nothing will ever replace Campbell Morris' Advanced Paper Aircraft Construction volumes 1-3 (or was it 4) for me, but this looks modern and ideal for young and aspiring ballistic cellulose aeronautical engineers.
Is this not just a reskin of https://foldnfly.com/ ?
Their YouTube channel has 750k subscribers and content going back 7 years. I don't think so.
Hi! I'm Kyle Boyer — the creator behind FoldableFlight.com and the associated YouTube channel. My website offers similar functionality to FoldNFly, but a completely different (and more extensive) library of planes, including the world record designs for distance and time aloft!
I think I owe you an apology, because my question was real, but worded in a way that wasn't very constructive. The answer is clearly that it's not a reskin. Thanks for taking the time to reply (and create an account).
In middle school I would compete in the South Florida Science Museum's egg drop, bridge, and paper airplane competitions.
A formative experience was losing the plane toss to a jock who entered only in that event, folded a few 'standard' airplanes, and fired off a few practice shots modeling the official throwing conditions (fixed elbow on a bench at kneeling height) before taking first place with a fresh plane.
I've always been more partial to the Ring Wing paper plane https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/the-ring-... Easy to make, has a stable flight profile, and is relatively hard to damage as the reinforced leading edge is the typical impact site.
That's a cool website. Is there a benchmark for these? I noticed some of these have scores ("Flies over x feet!") and some don't.
Mostly I'm just curious, how well does the standard crappy paper airplane fly, which every kid makes in school, how well does it fly relative to some of these world record winners? (Some of which have a lot more folds and measuring and tape than I was expecting!)
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator of FoldableFlight.com and the designer of many of the paper airplanes on it. I'd estimate that the standard "classic dart" paper airplane flies about 20 to 30 feet (less than 10 meters). Many of the paper airplanes on my website (even some easy ones) can be thrown over 100 feet (30ish meters). The world record design for distance can fly over 300 feet, though it requires cutting and a bit of tape.
Cool! I had "The World Record Paper Airplane Book" when I was a kid and loved it. Sorry to see so many on here had to deal with paper mismatches. Fortunately The World Record Paper Airplane Book came with colorful paper for each plane you could tear out of the back.
Here's the revised and expanded edition: https://www.amazon.com/World-Record-Paper-Airplane-Airplanes...
And here's the original if you want a hit of nostalgia: https://paperace.com/ken-blackburn-four-times-world-record-h...
In the late 1960s as a 3rd grader I was fascinated with the paper airplanes made by the older students during recess. At one point I came across an plane that had been left on the field and reverse engineered it. It was not until decades later that I actually saw the Nakamura Lock instructions in print. It has been a joy to show at least three generations of children how to make this plane. It flys well, is reasonably robust, and just a joy to make and play with. I recall my younger brother and I flying them at night at my parents house, just having a nice summer evening of simple play.
Too bad its just a bunch of youtube videos. Still cool!
The first thing on the page is the book they sell!
Effective marketing, since the first thing I thought was "$20? Unusual white elephant gift, I may have to get this"
If you're interested the link to the other related site has more step by step instructions: https://www.foldnfly.com/#/1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-1
Once made a paper airplane they called "the best paper airplane in the world" and threw it off a high spot in my city.
It flew so long in the same spot that Japanese tourists stopped and took pictures of it.
> Japanese tourists stopped and took pictures of it.
They really do take pictures of anything and everything hahah
- Airplane name isn't a link (only the image)
- Can't sort the airplanes
- Instructions are video only
Scrape, AI modify, extract text, release new product.
My parents subscribed to several magazines when I was a kid and any time a new one arrived I would shake out the subscription signup mail cards and make paper airplanes. They were small but something about the thickness of the paper made it very satisfying to fold and the planes fly very well.
I guess those cards must still exist but it has been ages since I have read a real magazine. I had a couple of dumb subscriptions in college but do not think I have ever had any since. Should consider it for our kids and to get me off my phone.
No mention of The Klutz Book of Paper Airplanes Book by Doug Stillinger? I don't recognize any of these new names but the designs look similar to the ones in Stillinger's book. The hammer in that book used to be the airplane which at some point won WR for furthest flight.
It would be nicer if the paper used in the videos were different color on each side. Maybe even checkered?
I folded the Vanguard (https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/vanguard), can attest that it’s relatively easy, looks great (kiddo loves it) and flies better than any plane I have previously folded.
Hi — I'm Kyle, the creator of FoldableFlight.com. That's awesome! I'm glad you enjoyed Vanguard. 2-colored paper is a good idea!
Somewhat off-topic, but this summer I was at a conference where Lufthansa was a vendor and had a contest: Whoever could take their brochure for working in their engineering group and turn it into an airplane that flys at least 10 meters got a Lufthansa plushie.
The person who got the farthest got some extra prize. I wish I'd know about this resource then!
Click on the first design, only way to learn how to fold is with a 10 minute YouTube video with plenty of the usual padding to get it to 10 minutes+ and "if you don't have the template" spread throughout.
So basically just buy the $35 worth of books and templates they're selling if you actually want to do this instead of playing and pausing a YT video a hundred times to get through this.
I think I'll fire up Publisher '97 and relive my paper plane memories.
Play the youtube video. You don't know what you're saying.
I used to spend a lot of time with origami books. They didn't have videos. You could consume the information as quickly as you wanted.
Unless, of course, you couldn't do that because the instructions were completely inscrutable. That happened a lot. More the rule than the exception, really.
Videos solve so many problems in this context. They would have saved me hours of confusion. Why would you complain that the free instructions are superior to the instructions you can pay for?
I'd watch a 10+ min video on Publisher '97!
Rather sad at work that it is no longer available to subscription folks.
Come on! They're selling you books in the $20 range and using free (if slightly tedious) videos to promote said books in a polite and non-pushy way. I can't believe this upsets people!
Love these types of businesses. Do one thing great, consistently, and be nearly obsessive. Deliver the primary value (the joy of exploring paper airplane designs through tutorial videos) for free, but make it super easy for people to buy the upgrade (a sweet book of paper airplanes with cool paper designs).
Wish every business was this simple.
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator of FoldableFlight.com and the designer of many of the paper airplanes in its database. Thanks for your kind words! Obsessive is certainly a fair description of me :-)
In hindsight, folding paper airplanes as a kid was the first testbench in rapid prototyping, and a forerunner to the fail fast philosophy.
Yes. Personal anecdote. I won the 1978 UCLA paper airplane contest by exactly this method.
There was a good design floating around (locally?) called a Pasquali [1]. In the couple of hours before the contest. I folded about a dozen of the design and tested them. The individual plane that flew best is the one that I flew in the contest.
(If you happen to know the UCLA campus, the plane was launched from the top of Boelter Hall -- about 3 floors up from memory. It flew all the way across the Engineering Quad to the raised courtyard between the Geology and Chemistry buildings.)
[1] If anybody here happens to know of this design, I've forgotten all of the details other than the name. I'd love to recover it! Sadly, the actual paper airplane is long lost.
There are way fancier designs out there today compared to when I was a kid in the 90's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu5zrlh6sCo&t=23s
Marvelous.
- Annoying mail popup that returns after being closed and is not remembered on refresh
- Every action takes 3-10 seconds, including pressing on regular ass links
- There's a big yellow button "Fold planes" on main page that redirects you to the main page?
- Login is a blue text on blue background
- You have to click on the image of the plane to get to it's page, clicking on text doesn't work (small thing, but very unintuitive)
Is there something wrong with my browser, or it's a website?
Same! When I encountered the mail popup it looked like I had accidentally drag-selected the entire website, and got extremely confused
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator of the website. I'm not proficient in web design.
What would it require for the mail popup to be remembered on refresh so you don't have to keep clicking off of it? I'd be happy to update that feature.
I wasn’t patient enough to go past that first one.
The mail popup crashed my browser (safari on iOS)
Crashed my browser.
Get an adblocker like a normal person.
I use uBlock Origin on Firefox. Makes no difference.
This website keeps hitting me with a nag pop and then glitching back to the top when I decline.
I’ve lost all respect for people who do shit like this.
Intermediate shows up twice for some reason.
Some reason being the AI messed up?
Hi! I'm Kyle — the creator of Foldable Flight. No AI has been used to make the site. The "some reason" behind the doubled "intermediate" toggle was human error (mine) in the CMS input for one of the planes. It's fixed now!
Figured something like that was the case, glad you could fix it! :)
Fantastic website, reminds me of a favourite for my child https://www.drawnfly.com
Great book for a smart 7 year old: The New World Champion Paper Airplane Book by John M. Collins
As a father of 4 kids (which of them 3 are boys) this is amazing. Will start trying some new plane design tonight !
Good luck!
Impressive and a bit uncanny, since I was just looking for something like this just yesterday, to help the kids fold.
My 6 yr olds favourite website - pretty cool to see it here. The book was great gift for him as well.
Thanks for your kind words!
Why don't paper airplanes ever get into arguments?
Because they always fold under pressure.
wow this is soo cool! Awesome work. When I was a kid I dreamed of selling such instructions and paper to others! Immediately bought your book so I can build some with my kids now. Thank you!
I’ve been folding A LOT of paper airplanes with my 3-year-old lately so this is perfect timing!
Some really fascinating designs in there. I might have to have a go at making the Quill!
Thanks! Good luck folding!
Cool, there's a bunch of designs I've never seen before.
Thanks! Good luck folding :-)
Going to use this with my kid. Cheers
Going to blow my five-year-old's mind when he gets home from school today.
Just had a nostalgic flashback
The Greatest Paper Airplanes: https://archive.org/details/PAPERAIR
this is very cool
This needs a frontier curve for the planes.
My son watched a ton of this at age ~8 or so. He built some really crazy stuff from memory and our house was full of great designs for like a year. Pretty great channel imo.
That's awesome! Thanks for your kind words.
"Just fold this part over here"... Mhm okay. "Not creasi–shit!