TD 1/27/17

John Collins
“Paper Airplane Guy”
Tuesday, January 31, 6:30 p.m.

John Collins had been a professional in television since 1979, working as a creative
director, executive producer, live television director, camera operator, news graphics
supervisor, voice-over artist, and in other capacities, when he designed a paper airplane
in 2012 that broke the world record for distance flown. The record still stands, and
Collins, whose original designs have since been published in three books (with tear-out
planes to fold and fly), translated into German, Russian, and Chinese, is now the world’s
foremost paper airplane expert.

His designs are recognized around the world; one was featured in the film Paper
Planes (2015), which dramatized an Australian boy’s quest to break the world record. In
2016, Collins turned paper airplanes into a full-time career, launching the National Paper
Airplane Contest and providing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)
education programs to aviation and space museums, science museums, libraries, and
schools across the U.S.

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Speaking here as part of MDE lecture series; is conducting an informal workshop for
MDE students (and others interested) on Wednesday, 2/1, 12:00 pm

“Paper airplanes have the scientific method built in. They beg you to experiment. The
hope of the world is in the hands of scientists. We need all of them we can get. We
have no spare brains on the planet.”

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Appeared on Conan O’Brien’s nightly show CONAN, May 08, 2013

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Clients - Corporate
Google Zeitgeist
Sony PS4
RBS Global (Brazil)
Intuit (Sunnyvale)
Genentch (San Francisco)
Quintiles International (Chicago)
ASDI (Palo Alto)
XOJet (San Bruno)
Impact Unlimited (New Jersey)
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[corporate clients, cont.]

Nucleus (product launch) (Las Vegas)
Red Bull International (Salzburg, Austria)
CR8 Global Summit (Shenzhen, China).

Clients - Educational
Singapore Science Center (Singapore)
Stanford University (California)
Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania)
Rice University (Texas)
The Green School (Bali, Indonesia)
The Tech Museum (San Jose, CA)
Hiller Aviation Museum(San Carlos, CA)
Evergreen Aviation Museum (Portland, OR)
Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA)
The Maker Fair (San Mateo, CA)
Parents Education Network (San Francisco, CA)

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From Smithsonian.com feature, September 2014

You might think paper airplanes are fun, quick-to-make toys for kids, but there is
a world of paper plane–makers who are dead serious about the creation of record-
setting planes.

John Collins, The Paper Airplane Guy, has studied both origami and aerodynamics to
design planes that set world records. In 2012, one of his designs, thrown by professional
football player Joe Ayoob, broke the Guinness world record for the farthest distance
flown.

The plane flew 226 feet, 10 inches to break the previous record by 19 feet, 6 inches.
Collins is the man in the blue-shirt jumping with joy.

So how can you get your mitts on such a fantastic flying paper plane? In his book, The
New World Champion Paper Airplane Book, Collins dishes on the design, a glider named
"Suzanne." Folding planes isn’t just to fill idle time, Collins writes:

Paper airplanes embody the scientific method. Every throw is an experiment. It’s a hobby
that begs the paper pilot to understand ever more in order to excel. Hypothesis,
experiment design, trial, and results—it’s all built into every plane and every throw. To
play with a paper airplane is to dabble in science, whether you know it or not.
Those serious about paper airplanes know that most strong fliers follow certain
scientific rules of thumb: the weight needs to be forward, but swept wings for an "up
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elevator effect" will give the flight stability. Collins likely knew all this but notes that his
Suzanne design is special:

Suzanne, the world-record paper airplane, boasts a series of firsts: the first glider to hold
the distance record, the first paper airplane to use changing airspeed to enhance
performance, the first plane to use a thrower/designer team, and the first plane to break
the record after the run-up-to-throw distance was shortened from 30 to 10 feet. It is a
truly amazing aircraft. I believe Suzanne changes the way distance records will be broken
in the future. The days of brute-force darts are gone, replaced by the age of true gliders

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2012 interview in Popular Mechanics, after breaking world record:

How long have you been trying to break the world record?
I started at 10 or 11 and I just kept on folding. Now I’m an overnight sensation after 40
years of folding. This particular quest started four years ago. Id been bragging about
planes to my friends for so long, but I’m a middle-aged man with a 51-year-old arm, so I
can’t throw that far. I had worked with a couple other quarterbacks before I found Joe
[Ayoob].

How’d you team up with him?
He’s a big paper airplane fan to begin with, plus he’s got one of those magic arms. He
can throw stuff [that’s] really light without wrecking his arm, and do tons of throws in a
day. Great arm strength, control, and precision. Could it be done with someone else?
Yeah, but he’s pretty close to perfect.

Tell us about the record-setting plane.
I originally started with ballistic dart design really thin-winged darts that you launch at a
45-degree angle. Everybody else who has broken the record before has done the
ballistic dart idea; [its] basically just a parabolic curve where gravity is in control.
But even with Joes arm we couldn’t throw a ballistic dart that far; 195 feet was our max.
So I scrapped the ballistic dart design for a high-performance glider design.

Whats the secret of your design?
It looks really simple, but it’s the most technical plane I’ve ever made.

I was down at Scaled Composites in Mojave, Calif., testing paper airplanes in their new
spaceship hangar. What was happening was that air was adhering farther back on the
plane as it slowed down, and the air was coming off the wings at different places
depending on how fast the plane was flying. I had never thought about that in terms of
paper planes before. Initially, I didn’t really know how to use that information.

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But eventually it came to me, and the plane relies on a couple of things to do this trick:
When you throw a plane really hard, you want a flat dihedral angle [the angle at which
wings are attached to the body of the plane] because a flat dihedral angle causes less
drag at higher speeds, like at the launch. More dihedral gives better stability during
gliding, which happens at slower speeds.

So I used that design having a flat angle on the nose that moves up another 10 degrees
on the wingtips, with the idea of air leaving the wing at different points based on
airspeed to create the glider plane.

How did you get the paper glider to do that slick thing where it hangs up in the air at
the apex of its ascent, then swings downward but doesn’t hit the floor?
The last third of the wing has a very slight curve to create up elevator [a control surface
on the rear stabilizer], so usually I bend the trailing edge up. If you look at the wing from
the top, there’s a slight concave bend in the last third of the wing;’ a subtle sweep to
create up elevator.

What’s the plane made of?
Another big breakthrough was changing the paper stock. Initially I was using paper with
really tiny ridges. The theory [held that] ridges acted like turbulators, like the veins on
an insect wing, to get better lift. That was true for my throwing speed I could throw 30
or 40 feet farther. But with Joe, the plane was deforming at a higher and higher degree
with the ridged paper. We were plateauing at 203 or 205 feet, [and] couldn’t push
through with ridged paper. So we switched to smooth paper. My throw decreased 20
feet, but Joes increased 40 feet. The maximum allowable weight by [Guinness World
Records] is 100 GSM, in the British paper system, which is equivalent to 26-to-27-pound
American paper. That’s about 1.5 times as thick as the paper in a typical photocopy
machine.

How big is the sheet of paper?
You can use 8.5 x 11 inch, but Guinness also lets you use A4, the British letter size. If you
use American paper you have to give up 3.5 percent on weight, so I used British letter
size, which is a little bit taller.

What do you love most about this?
I do lots of presentations for kids at flight museums and schools. I think science is
incredibly important, and the extent that I can get kids excited about it with paper
airplanes is really rewarding. I’ve spent a long time getting planes to do cool things and I
want to show kids: You don’t need computers and fancy things, you just need a sheet of
paper to do all this awesome stuff.