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Come on now... you know you want to build one and launch it at the guy in the cubical on the other side of the building.
There are lots of way to learn first-hand the principles of flight, but most of them require years of studying or a pilot’s license. There is, however, an exception: folding paper airplanes. Da Vinci did it, as did the Wright Brothers and Jack Northrop, and if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us. So we enlisted two master paper-plane folders, Takuo Toda (current Guinness record holder for the longest timed paper aircraft flight of 27.9 seconds) and Ken Blackburn (a former record holder and engineer at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base), to show us their best cracks at making a long-flying plane out of a sheet of super-light magazine paper.
When we asked Blackburn to design a custom paper plane, we couldn’t have imagined he’d come back with what he did. As a lifelong student of aeronautical engineering, Blackburn knew something we didn’t: a paper plane doesn’t necessarily have to look like a real plane—with a nose, two wings, and a tail—in order to stay aloft for a long time.
The Blackburn Popular Science 1 (BPS1) is a single-wing glider, designed to float gently from a slow, lofted launch. “This,” Blackburn says, “is what the world-record plane would look like if [Guinness] didn’t need the 60mph throw at the start of the flight,” Though a folded BPS1 looks simple, every fold, fin and flap is integral to maximizing flight time. So let’s start with the front of the plane and work our way back:
Wow... only 4? I think that'll do it! 