Paper Planes, Helicopters and Water Bombs

Introduction

Everyone knows how to make paper planes and things. Here are a few that will hopefully be new to you. Two other good sites with paper plane information are

Tim Granger's Planes page in which he describes some paper planes that he designed himself and
Ken Blackburn's world. Ken holds the Guinness world record for paper aeroplane flight.

What You Will Need

Everything is made with quarto size paper. When I was in primary school all our exercise books were quarto sized and so that is all I have ever used to make paper planes with. Other paper sizes might be OK. I think that A4 and foolscap are too long. US letter is probably OK. Quarto paper is approximately 210 X 168 mm.
You may also need some scissors.

Paper Things To Build

Here are instructions and diagrams to build some paper planes and things. In the diagrams solid lines represent edges that you can see, dashed lines show where you must fold the paper and dotted lines represent hidden folds and edges or construction lines. Green sections represent the flap that you should be folding over and red lines represent the fold line.

Plane: This plane is quick to make and always works well.
Bat Plane: The bat plane has a cool shape. It takes longer to build than the plane above and tends to work less reliably. In general it flies well.
Helicopter: Helicopters take almost no time to make. They spin to the ground when you drop them so the higher up you are the better.
Flying Fish: They take almost no time at all to make. They spin to the ground similarly to the helicopters.
Water bomb: This is a paper capsule that you can fill with water and then throw at your best friend on a hot day.

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Last modified: Fri Mar 20 15:12:12 1998