From humble beginnings, a childhood pastime can sometimes soar to incredible heights. Meet John Collins, the creative mind behind paper airplanes that defy gravity and expectations. He holds the Guinness World Record for the farthest flight by a paper aircraft, sending one of his intricate designs an astounding two hundred and twenty-six feet, ten inches. But how does a simple folded sheet of paper travel so far, and what turns a beloved hobby into a full-time career?
John’s journey began with basic dart designs as a child, but a pivotal moment came when his mother introduced him to the magic of the ‘water bomb base’ in origami. This sparked a lifelong quest to tinker, innovate, and master the art of paper aircraft design. Our American Stories explores how John combined childhood wonder with years of dedicated practice, pushing boundaries and overcoming humbling challenges to not only break a world record but also to inspire others to look at a simple piece of paper and dream of flight.
đź“– Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 origami base, this water bomb base.
Speaker 3: 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. 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, a substitute teacher brought an origami book in, and she was going to lead the class through making an origami crane, which, there’s, there’s too many complicated things about an origami 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: 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 petal 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, you know, ten years, using all these kinds of folding techniques and 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 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 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 find 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 going to be able to throw that hard. So, finding somebody that 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: Out of it.
Speaker 2: Was like, “Ooh, yeah, this is a different thing than I thought.” Here. This is going to 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 going to 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. 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 going to 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 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, 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 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 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 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, now that I’m thinking about it, 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 so much as just travel in a straight line. Actually, we tried to throw that kind of a plane, and, man, Joe 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 brought in a ringer,” and it’s, “No, you know, no wonder you could break the old world record.” Stephen had a really good arm, and he did it when 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 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 in adjusting this glider to do different things. At different speeds in the flight. That’s where we really dialed this thing in.
Speaker 1: 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 Wright brothers to John Collins’ flight fascinates. When we come back, the story of The Paper Airplane Guy, here on Our American Stories. And we 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 this amazing feat.
Speaker 2: Guinness rules are really specific about everything like paper size, paper thickness. You can use a little tiny piece of tape twenty-five by thirty millimeters. I ended up cutting into sixteen pieces and putting it all over the plane. They weren’t specific about whether or not you personally, the designer, had to throw the plane. There was nothing 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-thrower team. But Guinness seemed to like the idea. They thought it was cool. They thought, you know, it opens 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 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 going to crash? Is it going to 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 was a designer-thrower team. They liked the idea that it was a glider instead of a dart. And so I think, you know, Guinness 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 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 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 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. The first glider that I folded ended up being the correct folding solution. 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 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 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 at McClellan Airfield was a whole different beast starting on January 1. 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 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: 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: Because anything beyond two hundred feet is not considered calibrated with it if it’s a metal or cloth tape. You’ve 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 Guinness 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 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 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 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 excited as 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 up and flashing, and then the crowd goes nuts. You know, confetti cannons get fired. We’ve done it. Throw 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 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 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: You know?
Speaker 2: “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: Go big.
Speaker 2: 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.
Discover more real American voices.
