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Our American Stories

He Made Paper Airplanes His Full Time Job

Our American Stories

iHeartPodcasts

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6817 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode of Our American Stories, since John Collins was young, he has loved paper airplanes. This obsession helped him achieve the Guinness World Record for the farthest flight by a paper aircraft at 226 feet and 10 inches.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is an IHeart podcast.

0:04.5

Adventure should never come with a pause button.

0:07.1

Remember Movie Pass?

0:08.4

All the movies you wanted for just nine bucks?

0:11.1

I'm Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet.

0:13.9

And this season, I'm digging into the tech stories we weren't told.

0:17.4

Starting with Stacey Spikes, the black founder of movie pass who got pushed out of the company

0:21.6

he built.

0:22.8

Everybody's trying to knock you down and it's not going to work and no one's going to like it.

0:27.3

And then boom, it's everywhere.

0:29.3

And that was that moment.

0:30.7

Listen to there are no girls on the internet on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

0:44.8

You know, or wherever you get your podcast. And we continue with our American stories.

0:48.5

Up next, we have the story of John Collins.

0:52.0

He holds the Guinness World Record

0:53.6

for the farthest flight by a paper

0:55.7

aircraft at 226 feet 10 inches. To learn more about him, visit the paper airplane guy.com. Here's John

1:05.7

sharing how he came to love paper airplanes so much that they are now his full-time career.

1:18.8

I started probably about the age that most people start thinking about paper airplanes.

1:23.1

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 a total of 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's not a very good paper airplane so we started kind of tinkering around me and my brother 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.

2:04.0

And that's where you make a big X in the page and then flip it over and fold the other

2:07.9

direction. And then this thing all collapses down into a triangle that's got, you know, flaps on top

...

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