John Collins is ‘The Paper Airplane Guy‘, having built his career on the precision of perfect paper aerodynamics. Collins set the world record for paper airplane distance, and now he wants to spread the folded love.
In 1971, a young John Collins saw his first high-performance paper airplane flight demonstration. As it disappeared out of view, Collins was mesmerised and knew he wanted to invent new, better planes to fly farther and stay airborne longer. One day, he’d make it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
In February 2012 Collins’ childhood dream was realised. Joe Ayoob threw one of Collins’ custom-designed paper airplanes to set the new world record for distance at 226 feet and 10 inches – that’s about 69 metres.
Since Collins set the record, he’s been hard at work building something of a paper airplane empire. He had already published two books on the art and science of advanced paper airplane folding before the record throw in 2012. Between them, Fantastic Flight and The Gliding Flight contain instructions for almost 50 different airplanes constructed with nothing but paper – not even a dab of glue.
His third book is called The New World Champion Paper Airplane Book, which is pretty self-explanatory: this guy takes his paper airplanes very seriously. Collins has even released an app so you can go mobile with your paper airplane designs.
On his YouTube channel, Collins gets into the most minuscule details of paper airplane construction. Take for example this 30-minute video tutorial on how to construct the plane that set the world record in 2012. It’s named Suzanne, after his wife, and now you’ll know all the perfect wings and tail feathers of her namesake plane.
Collins and his paper dreams are also in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to fund a National Paper Airplane Contest in the US. Apparently Collins has traveled the world teaching kids and adults alike how to fold paper airplanes, from schools to juvenile detention centres to air and space museums. At time of writing the project has raised just over $US6,000 of its $US20,000 goal, with funding to cease on March 4.
If you back the campaign for $20 or more, you can get a personally-folded, hand-signed, John Collins original (complete with display stand). Or enter the contest when it gets off the ground to fold your way to eternal paper airplane glory at the next National Paper Airplane Contest!
The post The Paper Airplane Guy wants to teach you how to break a world record appeared first on Techly.