Just about everyone remembers the kid in class who could sail a paper airplane across the classroom, wakening the ire of a teacher and sentencing said airplane to the trash can.
John Collins was that kid - sort of.
“I was the guy who would make a great paper airplane,” Collins said. “And hand it to a guy who got in trouble.”
The fact Collins escaped culpability may be why he still has an endearing place for the paper airplane, which he still makes prolifically as an adult.
“Most people wonder how i got into it,” said Collins on a recent day. “The reality is I never got out of paper airplanes.”
It should be mentioned that Collins, who lives in Sausalito, long grew out of making those scrappy four-crease paper jets that flew a few feet before nose-diving.
These days he deftly folds canard designs, interconnected bi-planes and elaborate twin jets -- taking into consideration formulas for “wing-loading” and the “glide-ratio.” The secret, he’ll tell you, isn’t in the initial design.
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“The magic all happens with the adjusting,” he said, transforming a red sheet of paper into a multi-winged craft."
In 2012, Collins soared to the heights of the paper airplane world -- he broke the Guinness world distance record for a paper airplane with a simple looking eight-crease white jet, tossed more than 75 yards across a hangar by a former professional football quarterback. He eclipsed the former world record by 19 feet.
“Once I became the world record holder,” laughed Collins, “I went from being crazy to just eccentric.”
For 25 years, Collins has held workshops and exhibitions using paper airplanes to teach kids about science. Folded into each plane, he said, are a lot of lessons about aeronautics.
“To me, it’s more about getting kids fired up about science,” Collins said. “It’s a beautiful thing to learn how to control a paper airplane.”
Collins often holds workshops at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, surrounded by early machines of flight.
“People think about the science of flying as very high brow,” Jon Welte of the Hiller Museum said. “And John Collins shows how we can do that with even just a piece of paper.”
Now Collins is hoping to spread his love of paper flight to the rest of the country. He’s trying to raise the money to launch a national paper airplane contest - with competitions across the nation.
Museums would host local competitions, followed by regionals and a grand finale.
“It’s just wrapped around the idea of having fun with paper airplanes,” Collins said. “Learning a little science and figuring out who’s best.”
Inside the Hiller museum, Collins ticked off historic facts about the pilots and the planes, marveling at how one particularly rickety plane could’ve ever left the ground. It’s probable Collins is crafted in his own less-risky version of the Wright-brothers mold, gazing out at the sky contemplating the possibility of flight.
“In some sense flight will always be a little vicarious,” he said. “And this is, paper airplanes are a vicarious way for me into flight.”
