Paper plane
toy aircraft made of folded paper
A paper plane (also known as a paper airplane or paper dart in American English, or paper aeroplane in British English) is a toy aircraft, usually a glider, made out of a single folded sheet of paper or paperboard. It typically takes the form of a simple nose-heavy triangle thrown like a dart.
History
Paper airplanes are known to have been made as far back as the mid 19th century, based on an American children's book describing their construction from 1864.
The construction of a paper airplane, by Ludwig Prandtl at the 1924 banquet of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, was dismissed as an artless exercise by Theodore von Kármán:
Prandtl was also somewhat impulsive. I recall that on one occasion at a rather dignified dinner meeting following a conference in Delft, Holland, my sister [Josephine], who sat next to him at the table, asked him a question on the mechanics of flight. He started to explain; in the course of it he picked up a paper menu and fashioned a small model airplane, without thinking where he was. It landed on the shirtfront of the French Minister of Education, much to the embarrassment of my sister and others at the banquet.
Over time, paper model aircraft have gained design improvements in velocity, lift, propulsion, style, and fashion.
Advanced paper gliders
Developments
Paper gliders have experienced three forms of development in the period 1930–1988:
High flight performance
Scale modeling
Use of CAD software
Ongoing development of folded/origami gliders over the same period has seen similar sophistication,
including the addition of the following construction refinements
Increased fold-count, sometimes of an intricate nature
Explicit kirigami (cutting of paper) as a component of design
Requirements for additional ballast to ensure flight performance
Technological introductions
Technology responsible for the proliferation of advanced paper plane construction:
Inexpensive CAD software for 2D part design
Widespread manufacture, and inexpensive nature of acetal air-annealed glues, e.g. Bostik Clear-bond.
“Paper plane” enters the record as toy aircraft made of folded paper. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Paper, plane and aircraft can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q73767. The Library of Congress control number is sh85097594. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1864, 1924, 1930 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paper plane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.