October 10, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, since John Collins was young, he has loved paper airplanes. This obsession helped him achieve the Guinness World Record for the farthest flight by a paper aircraft at 226 feet and 10 inches.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, we
have the story of John Collins. He holds the Guinness
World Record for the farthest flight by a paper aircraft
at two hundred and twenty six feet ten inches. To
learn more about him, visit thepaper airplane guy dot com.
Here's John sharing how he came to love paper airplanes
(00:33):
so much that they are now his full time career.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I started probably about the age that most people start
thinking about paper airplanes, you know. Eight nine made the
same kind of you know, basic dart design. Most people
make you fold the piece of paper in half and
fold the corner down, you know, three more times, and
then or two more times, so it's so total three
folds down, and you end up with this kind of
dart shaped plane that kind of flies flies, okay the
(01:04):
first couple of flights, and then it starts like unfolding
itself and coming apart, and the nose gets crunched, and
it's not a very good paper airplane. So we started
kind of tinkering around. Me and my brothers had three
brothers around the same age, and we would, you know,
kind of tinker around with changing the design here or there.
And then my mom knew how to do this really
(01:25):
cool origami base called a water bomb base, and that's
where you make a big X in the page and
then flip it over and fold the other direction, and
then this thing all collapses down into a triangle that's
got you know, flaps on top and center of gravities
automatically move forward because you've got all these layers in
the front of the plane. It's just this magic base.
I continually invent planes even to this day, using this
(01:45):
oregami base, this water bomb base.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
How my mom knew how to do that, I have
no idea, but she did know how to do that
and showed it to us, and that, you know, and
from that moment on, I was off and running on
making paper airplanes. And I was just, i think, just
a little bit better than my siblings at folding paper
accurately and sharply, and you know, remembering folding sequences and stuff.
(02:09):
And so I could see that this was a little
bit of a success niche for me. You know, the
world record idea came along pretty soon after I started
folding a lot of designs. I started going, you know,
pushing as far as I could with inventing. You know
folding techniques on my own and trying to figure stuff out.
And then around the fourth grade, I think it was
(02:29):
a substitute teacher brought an origami book in and she
was going to lead the class through making an oregon
y crane, which there's there's too many complicated things about
an orgony crane to get through that for a fourth
grade class, and so it was a complete and utter disaster.
She finally gave up and turned this loose for recess.
But I got a look at this book.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
This was a book by Harbin, and it had all
of these things in it that I thought that I
had invented and just done way better. It was like
the smart way to do it. You know, reverse folds
and sink folds and pedal folds and all this. You know,
this whole world of folding ideas and techniques and tools
kind of opened up suddenly. And then I started making
claims with that, and that I made planes for another,
(03:13):
you know, ten years using all these kinds of folding
techniques in a little bit longer. And that about the
time that I had a really solid collection of planes
that I felt really good about a couple dozen of
these planes at that point, I'm kind of starting to
think that maybe a world record would be something to
go after. But I hadn't, you know, hadn't seriously considered,
you know, finding a venue and doing all the things
(03:34):
necessary to do it. And it's it's kind of a
big cumbersome undertaking, and so it would really be like
another twenty five years before I really seriously was looking at,
you know, who's selling more books? How can I make
my book sell more? How do I get you know,
on it? How do I get to the top. How
do I get to that a league for this thing?
And it turned out that the world record was kind
(03:55):
of your way in this is what this was the
way you were going to really prove that your stuff
is the best that you could, you know, get people
to pay attention. I had all this hubris, and I
was pretty sure that all I need to do is
plind a guy who could throw really hard, because you know,
I can throw okay, I could throw you know, one
hundred feet, but to really throw hard, you know, to
break the world record. I knew I was never gonna
be able to throw that hard. So finding somebody that
(04:18):
could throw hard and watching them throw my planes, the
planes pretty much just destroyed themselves under the with a
really hard throw. And so there was a very humbling
experience watching what you thought was a great paper airplane
really get the stuffing thrown.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Out of it.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Was like, ooh, yeah, this is a different thing than
I thought. Here. This is gonna be a little more difficulty.
You assume that if you just find somebody who can
throw hard, that's going to be, you know, the task,
that's that's gonna be the real task. But the first
guy that I worked with had such giant hands that
you couldn't really tell how he was holding the plane.
(04:58):
You know, he was grabbing it and and throwing it
really hard, and you could you could you know, the
plane would go left and right, and you know he
was kind of you know, holding it too hard and
kind of crunching it a little bit on the grip.
And so this this was not gonna be the guy.
You know, I couldn't really tell what he was doing
with the planes. The second guy, who was a college guy,
he was I think he's still a coach for SF
(05:21):
City College. He has such an explosive, snappy throw that
he was actually ripping the plane in half. Quarterbacks kind
of start with the ballpoint of the opposite direction that
they're going to throw, and then they spin, they twist
their wrist and it's kind of an explosive, really quick moment.
And so this guy had such a snappy throw he
was tearing planes in half, and so that I'm just like,
(05:42):
there's got to be somebody else. And so then I
found Joe, the guy who who ended up being pretty
much the perfect person to work with for paper airplanes,
because he had already changed his throw once for his sports,
and so he went from being a baseball pitcher to
a football quarterback, and in doing so, he changed his
(06:07):
throwing mechanics to match the sport. So Joe, not like
these other the other guys were going, I know how
to throw a football really hard, and I'm going to
just throw the paper airplane like I throw the football.
Joe approached it from how do I throw the paper
airplane hard? This is how I throw a baseball hard,
this is how I throw a football hard? How do
I throw a paper airplane hard? And so he just
had this whole different kind of top down idea that
(06:31):
the other guys just didn't have. And so, you know,
he worked on launching moving his elbow down so that
the plane would be level when it launched, and then
worked on smooth acceleration because paper airplanes don't like going
ninety miles per hour and they really don't like going
from zero to ninety fast. And so these were kind
(06:52):
of two big keys that Joe worked on, you know,
launch angle on release, and let's accelerate as smoothly as
we can to get as fast as we need to go.
So the old world record for paper airplane distance was
two hundred seven feet and four inches. That record holder
held that record for a little less than ten years,
nine and a half years, which is almost I think
(07:15):
now that i'm thinking about, it's about as long as
I've held the record at this point that Joe and
I have held the record. Stephen Krieger and the two
guys before him had both used a very particular kind
of plane that you could think of more like a javelin.
You could think of it like a ballistic dart. That
plane would get thrown at a forty five degree angle.
It didn't matter whether it stayed right side up or
upside down on the flight, and it really didn't fly
(07:36):
so much as just travel in a straight line. Actually,
we tried to throw that kind of a plane and man,
joke really couldn't throw a projectile that far. And so,
you know, a lot it gets made of the idea
that I used a thrower, and then people say, oh,
you rot in a ringer, and it's no, you know,
no wonder you could break the old world record. Steven
had a really good arm and he did it when
(07:57):
he was fifteen, and I think you have more cardili
junior arm according to people who throw stuff, and so
his arm was a little more flexible. Joe had told
me a couple of times, Hey, you know, if we
had done it when I was fifteen, I probably could
have thrown the projectile that far. But he couldn't. At
the age of twenty five or twenty six, he couldn't
throw a projectile that distance. And so we changed the
(08:17):
kind of plane to a glider. That ended up being
a really great decision, but it makes it so much
more difficult to control downrange. And so it became this
real challenge of the accuracy and precision with which Joe
could throw the plane, and then the same sort of
accuracy and precision with adjusting this glider to do different things.
(08:37):
At different speeds in the flight. That's where we really
dialed this thing in.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And you're listening to John Collins tell the story of
how he came to break the Guinness World Record for
the farthest flight by a paper aircraft. And I love
this about Americans. We love our hobbies, we love our pastimes,
and we loved well setting records, going faster and trying
all kinds of things. From the right brothers to John Collins'
(09:07):
flight fascinates when we come back the story of the
paper airplane guy here on our American story and we
(09:40):
continue with our American stories. And we've been listening to
John Collins, the Guinness World record holder for the farthest
flight by a paper aircraft at two hundred and twenty
six feet and ten inches. By the way, the old
record of two hundred and seven feet four inches had
been held for ten years and he shattered it. Not
even close. Back to John on how he had teamed
(10:03):
this amazing feat.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Guinness rules are really specific about everything like paper size,
paper thickness. You can use a little tiny piece of
tape twenty five x thirty millimeters. You can cut that
into as many pieces as you like. Ended up cutting
into sixteen pieces and putting it all over the plane.
They weren't specific about whether or not you personally had
the designer had to throw the plane. There was nothing
(10:29):
in there about that. And predictably, the old World record
holder did not like that idea, which led to a
bit of a kerfuffle. He complained enough that we wound
up on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. He
was not happy with this idea of a designer throw
or team. But Guinness seemed to like the idea. They
thought it was cool. They thought, you know, it opens
(10:49):
it up a little bit. If you've got a great
idea for a paper airplane but don't have a terrific arm,
there's no reason you should be locked out of this competition.
They thought it kind of broadened the idea, and they
were really happy to see a paper airplane fly across
the distance goal as opposed to just crash into it.
That was really thrilling. And if you watch the old
(11:10):
World record plane, you know it takes about three seconds
to go the distance. My plane, there's you know, you
watch it climb, it rocks over the top and then
flares and really flies. I mean, there's some drama it's
just like, is it gonna crash? Is it gonna stay
on course? You know, it takes nine seconds, so there's
there's definitely time to think about it, you know, as
this thing is rocketing down course. So and they liked
all of that. They liked the idea that that it
(11:32):
was a designer thrower team. They liked the idea that
it was a glider instead of a dart. And so
I think, you know, Guinnis loved this, this new approach.
It wasn't a traditional approach by any means. It was
totally different. It was unique. And then there are unique
things about the plane aerodynamically. This is one of the
well I could say it's the most sophisticated paper airplane
(11:53):
I've ever designed, even though it's just really simple folding
the folding technique, I can teach you how to fold
this plane in ten minutes, but adjusting it to get
world record distance out of it is complicated and fascinating.
It turned out that around the same time, NASA was
doing experiments that would verify my suppositions about airflow and
(12:15):
speed and you know, this size wing. So it ended
up in a weird way getting verified all all the
things that I was thinking and dreaming up that were
happening on the wing of the plane ended up being real.
I wasn't. I wasn't just in never never Land. You know,
we had good experimental evidence to back up what I
was thinking. But it was really cool to have all
(12:35):
that verified by by NASA. Well, get getting the world
record was about a three year journey for me, and
Joe was there. My thrower was there for the last
eighteen months of that, so he was there for a
little bit over half of the three year deal. First
glider that I folded ended up being the correct folding solution.
(12:56):
There's a lot of other adjusting that goes on, but
just just the folding solution, the very first one out
of the box was correct. Now, the problem is you
don't know that. You still have to do all the testing,
all the permutations, all the combinations, all the testing. You know,
you can't know whether that's the right solution until you
try all the other solutions, and so it feels like
it should be a lucky thing, but is it. You
(13:19):
still have to do everything else. It didn't. It didn't
cut down on the amount of work. In the long run.
You still have to do all the other stuff. We
had made an unsuccessful attempt August of twenty eleven, and
this and the record was set in February of twenty twelve.
And so coming off that August defeat, you know, my
(13:41):
wife and other people were saying, you know, just take
a break, just think about it, try something else. You know,
they were kind of cautioning, you know, don't do this
too quickly again, because you know, it's not just me
failing for myself. It's like, you know, you drag all
your friends out there, and you know they go through
the heartache of watching you try your best and just
not quite get there. And so, anyway, world record day
(14:05):
at McClellan Airfield was a whole different beast starting on
January one. As a matter of fact, in this new hangar,
we didn't have a practice session where we didn't break
the world record three out of ten tries. You get
ten tries and you just have to break it on
one of those throws. But we were doing it three
out of ten times very consistently. Once we you know, really,
once I really figured out what was going on with
(14:26):
the plane, the drama wasn't whether we were going to
break the record. The drama for us was like how
much are we going to break it by?
Speaker 4 (14:33):
But given all that that, you still have to do
it that day with the press there, you know, with
the video cameras rolling with a guy that you've hired
to do measuring.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Because anything beyond two hundred feet is not considered calibrated
with it if it's a metal or cloth tape. You got,
so you have to have a surveyor. You hire a
surveyor who could do a laser transit shot. You've got
three camera guys that you hire that hopefully get this
thing recorded in one take because Ginnis wants you know,
one unedited you know take for this thing. And so
you got to have great camera guys. You got to
have media coverage, you got to have a surveyor, you
(15:07):
got to have judges that are qualified to do it.
And then you know, you just you want to have
you know, friends and family around to have a little celebration.
So all of that pressure is, you know, no matter
what kind of looming over the situation. And so we
take probably two throws earlier than we should have. The
throws one and two kind of probably pulled the trigger
(15:27):
earlier than we should have. Throw three is very good,
and throw four we break the record and that you
can listen to the video. You don't even have to
watch the video. You can listen to the video and
know that it's going to happen. Joe releases it and
right away I can tell it's going exactly where it
should go. You know I'm going You know that that's
(15:49):
going to do it. It flies up and goes over
the top of that arc in exactly the same way
that has our planes have broken the world record before,
and then starts its downhill run. You can hear the
crowd start to get ex is that plane starts to
make a downhill run toward the finish line, and then
it lifts up with the last third to go and
just goes flying across those rope. Lights that start lighting
(16:09):
up and flashing, and then the crowd goes nuts. You know, confetti,
cannons get fired. We've done it. Thrown number four totally successful.
The crowd goes nuts. It's everything you would want out
of a world record moment. It's just it's a perfect moment.
You know, It's something I'm incredibly proud of it. It
took a lot of work and a different sort of
(16:31):
work than I anticipated going in. You know, at the
end of the day, a paper airplane world record that
doesn't save the world. Nobody lives or dies, nobody gets rich,
nobody goes to the poorhouse. It's just this kind of
goofy kind of fun thing. But even that kind of
modest record world record idea attracts a certain amount of
(16:54):
energy and a certain wave and a certain feeling that
you can't really get any other way. So I would
you know, if people are out there listening, you wonder, Hey,
you know, I'm pretty good at this. Should I try to?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
You know?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Should I go big or go home? It's like, go
big is my advice. You already know what it feels
like to go home.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Go big.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
You'll learn so much about yourself, You'll learn so much
about your friends. It's an important life moment. Whether or
not you get it done doesn't matter. Just deciding to
go big on something is that's important. This opportunity for
the last four or five years to be the paper
airplane guy, you know, I mean, I throw paper airplanes
(17:34):
for a living. Nobody on the planet has a better
gig than I've got. Even when I had a good job,
you know, that I really liked. I didn't like it
as much as this. It's just an incredible opportunity to meet,
you know, young kids who want to learn a little
something about paper airplanes and are curious about the science.
And you're dealing with all these magical forces. Really you're
(17:54):
you know, invisible stuff you can't see. You're dealing with gravity,
You're dealing with air thrust and drag, and you can't
see any of the stuff. Some of it you kind
of have to just take on belief and then. And
so it's kind of I look at it as my
job to sort of reveal, you know, the solid underpinnings
of all these kinds of ideas and show them, you know,
(18:15):
how it all works to create, you know, something that flies.
What a gift to get to be able to do that,
to be able to do this thing that I've been
fascinated with, you know, the idea of something flying since
I was just tiny. I mean, I watch insects and
birds and full size airplanes and all these things fly,
and they use different ways to do it and get
(18:35):
to pass along that passion that you know, that fascination.
You know, I've never lost track of the idea of
how wondrous it is that things fly at all, that
they managed to do it. And then you know the
idea that you could take probably one of the most
modest resources on the planet, just a sheet of paper,
(18:56):
and turn it into a flying machine that's totally cool.
And the idea that you could transmit that knowledge to
somebody else, that they could then do it and figure
out how to make a different one, make an invent
their own. And to me, I love that moment when
the kids that I've worked with in the past send
me a picture of a plane that they've invented that
can do this really cool thing. It becomes this magic
(19:18):
object that not only flies, but it came from them.
Some part of them is now in this object and
it has joined this magic world of flight as well.
So I get to do that. That's what I get
to do. I don't know how you get a better
job than that. That's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
And great work is always by our creative team and
our storytelling team, and that's faith in Robbie and Madison
working on that piece. And a special thanks to John
Collins for sharing his passion and his story. The paper
Airplane Guide dot Com is where you can find him.
I love the way he described throw four. I mean,
he's just back there in twenty twelve, and the record
(19:55):
has stood all this time, folks, beating the ten year
record that held before then. The story of the world
record holder for paper aircraft flight, the story of John Collins,
tear on our American story.
And we continue with our American stories. Up next, we
have the story of John Collins. He holds the Guinness
World Record for the farthest flight by a paper aircraft
at two hundred and twenty six feet ten inches. To
learn more about him, visit thepaper airplane guy dot com.
Here's John sharing how he came to love paper airplanes
(00:33):
so much that they are now his full time career.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I started probably about the age that most people start
thinking about paper airplanes, you know. Eight nine made the
same kind of you know, basic dart design. Most people
make you fold the piece of paper in half and
fold the corner down, you know, three more times, and
then or two more times, so it's so total three
folds down, and you end up with this kind of
dart shaped plane that kind of flies flies, okay the
(01:04):
first couple of flights, and then it starts like unfolding
itself and coming apart, and the nose gets crunched, and
it's not a very good paper airplane. So we started
kind of tinkering around. Me and my brothers had three
brothers around the same age, and we would, you know,
kind of tinker around with changing the design here or there.
And then my mom knew how to do this really
(01:25):
cool origami base called a water bomb base, and that's
where you make a big X in the page and
then flip it over and fold the other direction, and
then this thing all collapses down into a triangle that's
got you know, flaps on top and center of gravities
automatically move forward because you've got all these layers in
the front of the plane. It's just this magic base.
I continually invent planes even to this day, using this
(01:45):
oregami base, this water bomb base.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
How my mom knew how to do that, I have
no idea, but she did know how to do that
and showed it to us, and that, you know, and
from that moment on, I was off and running on
making paper airplanes. And I was just, i think, just
a little bit better than my siblings at folding paper
accurately and sharply, and you know, remembering folding sequences and stuff.
(02:09):
And so I could see that this was a little
bit of a success niche for me. You know, the
world record idea came along pretty soon after I started
folding a lot of designs. I started going, you know,
pushing as far as I could with inventing. You know
folding techniques on my own and trying to figure stuff out.
And then around the fourth grade, I think it was
(02:29):
a substitute teacher brought an origami book in and she
was going to lead the class through making an oregon
y crane, which there's there's too many complicated things about
an orgony crane to get through that for a fourth
grade class, and so it was a complete and utter disaster.
She finally gave up and turned this loose for recess.
But I got a look at this book.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
This was a book by Harbin, and it had all
of these things in it that I thought that I
had invented and just done way better. It was like
the smart way to do it. You know, reverse folds
and sink folds and pedal folds and all this. You know,
this whole world of folding ideas and techniques and tools
kind of opened up suddenly. And then I started making
claims with that, and that I made planes for another,
(03:13):
you know, ten years using all these kinds of folding
techniques in a little bit longer. And that about the
time that I had a really solid collection of planes
that I felt really good about a couple dozen of
these planes at that point, I'm kind of starting to
think that maybe a world record would be something to
go after. But I hadn't, you know, hadn't seriously considered,
you know, finding a venue and doing all the things
(03:34):
necessary to do it. And it's it's kind of a
big cumbersome undertaking, and so it would really be like
another twenty five years before I really seriously was looking at,
you know, who's selling more books? How can I make
my book sell more? How do I get you know,
on it? How do I get to the top. How
do I get to that a league for this thing?
And it turned out that the world record was kind
(03:55):
of your way in this is what this was the
way you were going to really prove that your stuff
is the best that you could, you know, get people
to pay attention. I had all this hubris, and I
was pretty sure that all I need to do is
plind a guy who could throw really hard, because you know,
I can throw okay, I could throw you know, one
hundred feet, but to really throw hard, you know, to
break the world record. I knew I was never gonna
be able to throw that hard. So finding somebody that
(04:18):
could throw hard and watching them throw my planes, the
planes pretty much just destroyed themselves under the with a
really hard throw. And so there was a very humbling
experience watching what you thought was a great paper airplane
really get the stuffing thrown.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Out of it.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Was like, ooh, yeah, this is a different thing than
I thought. Here. This is gonna be a little more difficulty.
You assume that if you just find somebody who can
throw hard, that's going to be, you know, the task,
that's that's gonna be the real task. But the first
guy that I worked with had such giant hands that
you couldn't really tell how he was holding the plane.
(04:58):
You know, he was grabbing it and and throwing it
really hard, and you could you could you know, the
plane would go left and right, and you know he
was kind of you know, holding it too hard and
kind of crunching it a little bit on the grip.
And so this this was not gonna be the guy.
You know, I couldn't really tell what he was doing
with the planes. The second guy, who was a college guy,
he was I think he's still a coach for SF
(05:21):
City College. He has such an explosive, snappy throw that
he was actually ripping the plane in half. Quarterbacks kind
of start with the ballpoint of the opposite direction that
they're going to throw, and then they spin, they twist
their wrist and it's kind of an explosive, really quick moment.
And so this guy had such a snappy throw he
was tearing planes in half, and so that I'm just like,
(05:42):
there's got to be somebody else. And so then I
found Joe, the guy who who ended up being pretty
much the perfect person to work with for paper airplanes,
because he had already changed his throw once for his sports,
and so he went from being a baseball pitcher to
a football quarterback, and in doing so, he changed his
(06:07):
throwing mechanics to match the sport. So Joe, not like
these other the other guys were going, I know how
to throw a football really hard, and I'm going to
just throw the paper airplane like I throw the football.
Joe approached it from how do I throw the paper
airplane hard? This is how I throw a baseball hard,
this is how I throw a football hard? How do
I throw a paper airplane hard? And so he just
had this whole different kind of top down idea that
(06:31):
the other guys just didn't have. And so, you know,
he worked on launching moving his elbow down so that
the plane would be level when it launched, and then
worked on smooth acceleration because paper airplanes don't like going
ninety miles per hour and they really don't like going
from zero to ninety fast. And so these were kind
(06:52):
of two big keys that Joe worked on, you know,
launch angle on release, and let's accelerate as smoothly as
we can to get as fast as we need to go.
So the old world record for paper airplane distance was
two hundred seven feet and four inches. That record holder
held that record for a little less than ten years,
nine and a half years, which is almost I think
(07:15):
now that i'm thinking about, it's about as long as
I've held the record at this point that Joe and
I have held the record. Stephen Krieger and the two
guys before him had both used a very particular kind
of plane that you could think of more like a javelin.
You could think of it like a ballistic dart. That
plane would get thrown at a forty five degree angle.
It didn't matter whether it stayed right side up or
upside down on the flight, and it really didn't fly
(07:36):
so much as just travel in a straight line. Actually,
we tried to throw that kind of a plane and man,
joke really couldn't throw a projectile that far. And so,
you know, a lot it gets made of the idea
that I used a thrower, and then people say, oh,
you rot in a ringer, and it's no, you know,
no wonder you could break the old world record. Steven
had a really good arm and he did it when
(07:57):
he was fifteen, and I think you have more cardili
junior arm according to people who throw stuff, and so
his arm was a little more flexible. Joe had told
me a couple of times, Hey, you know, if we
had done it when I was fifteen, I probably could
have thrown the projectile that far. But he couldn't. At
the age of twenty five or twenty six, he couldn't
throw a projectile that distance. And so we changed the
(08:17):
kind of plane to a glider. That ended up being
a really great decision, but it makes it so much
more difficult to control downrange. And so it became this
real challenge of the accuracy and precision with which Joe
could throw the plane, and then the same sort of
accuracy and precision with adjusting this glider to do different things.
(08:37):
At different speeds in the flight. That's where we really
dialed this thing in.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And you're listening to John Collins tell the story of
how he came to break the Guinness World Record for
the farthest flight by a paper aircraft. And I love
this about Americans. We love our hobbies, we love our pastimes,
and we loved well setting records, going faster and trying
all kinds of things. From the right brothers to John Collins'
(09:07):
flight fascinates when we come back the story of the
paper airplane guy here on our American story and we
(09:40):
continue with our American stories. And we've been listening to
John Collins, the Guinness World record holder for the farthest
flight by a paper aircraft at two hundred and twenty
six feet and ten inches. By the way, the old
record of two hundred and seven feet four inches had
been held for ten years and he shattered it. Not
even close. Back to John on how he had teamed
(10:03):
this amazing feat.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Guinness rules are really specific about everything like paper size,
paper thickness. You can use a little tiny piece of
tape twenty five x thirty millimeters. You can cut that
into as many pieces as you like. Ended up cutting
into sixteen pieces and putting it all over the plane.
They weren't specific about whether or not you personally had
the designer had to throw the plane. There was nothing
(10:29):
in there about that. And predictably, the old World record
holder did not like that idea, which led to a
bit of a kerfuffle. He complained enough that we wound
up on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. He
was not happy with this idea of a designer throw
or team. But Guinness seemed to like the idea. They
thought it was cool. They thought, you know, it opens
(10:49):
it up a little bit. If you've got a great
idea for a paper airplane but don't have a terrific arm,
there's no reason you should be locked out of this competition.
They thought it kind of broadened the idea, and they
were really happy to see a paper airplane fly across
the distance goal as opposed to just crash into it.
That was really thrilling. And if you watch the old
(11:10):
World record plane, you know it takes about three seconds
to go the distance. My plane, there's you know, you
watch it climb, it rocks over the top and then
flares and really flies. I mean, there's some drama it's
just like, is it gonna crash? Is it gonna stay
on course? You know, it takes nine seconds, so there's
there's definitely time to think about it, you know, as
this thing is rocketing down course. So and they liked
all of that. They liked the idea that that it
(11:32):
was a designer thrower team. They liked the idea that
it was a glider instead of a dart. And so
I think, you know, Guinnis loved this, this new approach.
It wasn't a traditional approach by any means. It was
totally different. It was unique. And then there are unique
things about the plane aerodynamically. This is one of the
well I could say it's the most sophisticated paper airplane
(11:53):
I've ever designed, even though it's just really simple folding
the folding technique, I can teach you how to fold
this plane in ten minutes, but adjusting it to get
world record distance out of it is complicated and fascinating.
It turned out that around the same time, NASA was
doing experiments that would verify my suppositions about airflow and
(12:15):
speed and you know, this size wing. So it ended
up in a weird way getting verified all all the
things that I was thinking and dreaming up that were
happening on the wing of the plane ended up being real.
I wasn't. I wasn't just in never never Land. You know,
we had good experimental evidence to back up what I
was thinking. But it was really cool to have all
(12:35):
that verified by by NASA. Well, get getting the world
record was about a three year journey for me, and
Joe was there. My thrower was there for the last
eighteen months of that, so he was there for a
little bit over half of the three year deal. First
glider that I folded ended up being the correct folding solution.
(12:56):
There's a lot of other adjusting that goes on, but
just just the folding solution, the very first one out
of the box was correct. Now, the problem is you
don't know that. You still have to do all the testing,
all the permutations, all the combinations, all the testing. You know,
you can't know whether that's the right solution until you
try all the other solutions, and so it feels like
it should be a lucky thing, but is it. You
(13:19):
still have to do everything else. It didn't. It didn't
cut down on the amount of work. In the long run.
You still have to do all the other stuff. We
had made an unsuccessful attempt August of twenty eleven, and
this and the record was set in February of twenty twelve.
And so coming off that August defeat, you know, my
(13:41):
wife and other people were saying, you know, just take
a break, just think about it, try something else. You know,
they were kind of cautioning, you know, don't do this
too quickly again, because you know, it's not just me
failing for myself. It's like, you know, you drag all
your friends out there, and you know they go through
the heartache of watching you try your best and just
not quite get there. And so, anyway, world record day
(14:05):
at McClellan Airfield was a whole different beast starting on
January one. As a matter of fact, in this new hangar,
we didn't have a practice session where we didn't break
the world record three out of ten tries. You get
ten tries and you just have to break it on
one of those throws. But we were doing it three
out of ten times very consistently. Once we you know, really,
once I really figured out what was going on with
(14:26):
the plane, the drama wasn't whether we were going to
break the record. The drama for us was like how
much are we going to break it by?
Speaker 4 (14:33):
But given all that that, you still have to do
it that day with the press there, you know, with
the video cameras rolling with a guy that you've hired
to do measuring.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Because anything beyond two hundred feet is not considered calibrated
with it if it's a metal or cloth tape. You got,
so you have to have a surveyor. You hire a
surveyor who could do a laser transit shot. You've got
three camera guys that you hire that hopefully get this
thing recorded in one take because Ginnis wants you know,
one unedited you know take for this thing. And so
you got to have great camera guys. You got to
have media coverage, you got to have a surveyor, you
(15:07):
got to have judges that are qualified to do it.
And then you know, you just you want to have
you know, friends and family around to have a little celebration.
So all of that pressure is, you know, no matter
what kind of looming over the situation. And so we
take probably two throws earlier than we should have. The
throws one and two kind of probably pulled the trigger
(15:27):
earlier than we should have. Throw three is very good,
and throw four we break the record and that you
can listen to the video. You don't even have to
watch the video. You can listen to the video and
know that it's going to happen. Joe releases it and
right away I can tell it's going exactly where it
should go. You know I'm going You know that that's
(15:49):
going to do it. It flies up and goes over
the top of that arc in exactly the same way
that has our planes have broken the world record before,
and then starts its downhill run. You can hear the
crowd start to get ex is that plane starts to
make a downhill run toward the finish line, and then
it lifts up with the last third to go and
just goes flying across those rope. Lights that start lighting
(16:09):
up and flashing, and then the crowd goes nuts. You know, confetti,
cannons get fired. We've done it. Thrown number four totally successful.
The crowd goes nuts. It's everything you would want out
of a world record moment. It's just it's a perfect moment.
You know, It's something I'm incredibly proud of it. It
took a lot of work and a different sort of
(16:31):
work than I anticipated going in. You know, at the
end of the day, a paper airplane world record that
doesn't save the world. Nobody lives or dies, nobody gets rich,
nobody goes to the poorhouse. It's just this kind of
goofy kind of fun thing. But even that kind of
modest record world record idea attracts a certain amount of
(16:54):
energy and a certain wave and a certain feeling that
you can't really get any other way. So I would
you know, if people are out there listening, you wonder, Hey,
you know, I'm pretty good at this. Should I try to?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
You know?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Should I go big or go home? It's like, go
big is my advice. You already know what it feels
like to go home.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Go big.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
You'll learn so much about yourself, You'll learn so much
about your friends. It's an important life moment. Whether or
not you get it done doesn't matter. Just deciding to
go big on something is that's important. This opportunity for
the last four or five years to be the paper
airplane guy, you know, I mean, I throw paper airplanes
(17:34):
for a living. Nobody on the planet has a better
gig than I've got. Even when I had a good job,
you know, that I really liked. I didn't like it
as much as this. It's just an incredible opportunity to meet,
you know, young kids who want to learn a little
something about paper airplanes and are curious about the science.
And you're dealing with all these magical forces. Really you're
(17:54):
you know, invisible stuff you can't see. You're dealing with gravity,
You're dealing with air thrust and drag, and you can't
see any of the stuff. Some of it you kind
of have to just take on belief and then. And
so it's kind of I look at it as my
job to sort of reveal, you know, the solid underpinnings
of all these kinds of ideas and show them, you know,
(18:15):
how it all works to create, you know, something that flies.
What a gift to get to be able to do that,
to be able to do this thing that I've been
fascinated with, you know, the idea of something flying since
I was just tiny. I mean, I watch insects and
birds and full size airplanes and all these things fly,
and they use different ways to do it and get
(18:35):
to pass along that passion that you know, that fascination.
You know, I've never lost track of the idea of
how wondrous it is that things fly at all, that
they managed to do it. And then you know the
idea that you could take probably one of the most
modest resources on the planet, just a sheet of paper,
(18:56):
and turn it into a flying machine that's totally cool.
And the idea that you could transmit that knowledge to
somebody else, that they could then do it and figure
out how to make a different one, make an invent
their own. And to me, I love that moment when
the kids that I've worked with in the past send
me a picture of a plane that they've invented that
can do this really cool thing. It becomes this magic
(19:18):
object that not only flies, but it came from them.
Some part of them is now in this object and
it has joined this magic world of flight as well.
So I get to do that. That's what I get
to do. I don't know how you get a better
job than that. That's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
And great work is always by our creative team and
our storytelling team, and that's faith in Robbie and Madison
working on that piece. And a special thanks to John
Collins for sharing his passion and his story. The paper
Airplane Guide dot Com is where you can find him.
I love the way he described throw four. I mean,
he's just back there in twenty twelve, and the record
(19:55):
has stood all this time, folks, beating the ten year
record that held before then. The story of the world
record holder for paper aircraft flight, the story of John Collins,
tear on our American story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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