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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

- Can't sort the airplanes

- Instructions are video only

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.

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!)

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.

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

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

Intermediate shows up twice for some reason.

- 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?

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

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!

This needs a frontier curve for the planes.

Some really fascinating designs in there. I might have to have a go at making the Quill!

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.