Fold Epic Paper Airplanes

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!

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

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

Going to use this with my kid. Cheers

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.

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.

Wouldn't have expected 40min video to fold an airplane: https://www.foldableflight.com/planes/lancer!

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.

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!

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.

Is this not just a reskin of https://foldnfly.com/ ?

As a father of 4 kids (which of them 3 are boys) this is amazing. Will start trying some new plane design tonight !

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.

- Airplane name isn't a link (only the image)

- Can't sort the airplanes

- Instructions are video only

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.

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!)

My 6 yr olds favourite website - pretty cool to see it here. The book was great gift for him as well.

- 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?

Too bad its just a bunch of youtube videos. Still cool!

Intermediate shows up twice for some reason.

Impressive and a bit uncanny, since I was just looking for something like this just yesterday, to help the kids fold.

Cool, there's a bunch of designs I've never seen before.

In hindsight, folding paper airplanes as a kid was the first testbench in rapid prototyping, and a forerunner to the fail fast philosophy.

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!

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.

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