Papering the house with aeroplanes

For eight-year-old Arnav Pawar, making paper planes is more than just a creative pastime. For unlike kids his age, he has made over 50 paper replicas of different models of planes which have made to the Guinness Book of World Records.

It all started two months ago when Arnav began making paper planes as a mere pastime. With the help of some iPad applications, he managed to understand everything from each model’s velocity to thrust and aerodynamics.

His inspiration is Ken Blackburn, a paper aeroplane pioneer whose record-breaking models made it to the Guinness book. “When he started making them, I had no idea that he would get so passionate about it,” said Deepali Pawar, Arnav’s mother. “He is a shy kid. It is otherwise very difficult to make him sit in one place even for five minutes but he can sit for hours together with his paper planes. After taking some help from his father, he did some research and development on the subject on his own.”

From building basic paper planes and competing around, in terms of speed and distance with his friends, Arnav started to stray away only to build these special models with a lot of patience and focus. And now, his friends are excited to try and learn from him.

“My favourite is the ‘Love Train’ model. I like it because it looks good,” said a shy Arnav. “You cannot make the ‘Love Train’ with hard paper. It is a stationary model, hence you cannot fly it.”

There are apparently two different categories of paper planes: flying and stationary.
The one which goes the farthest is ‘Shuttle’. “I love flying it. You should not make paper planes from anything but one single paper. No stapler or gum should be used. And you must always fly them indoors,” he said. All models have been tested against providing efficient flight time as per their designs.

It would be a given for anyone to think that Arnav would want to be a pilot some day. But no. “I want to be a chess player,” he says enthusiastically. It now turns out that the little champion has taken part in national-level chess tournaments.

A class 2 student, Arnav wishes to dedicate these paper planes to the country as part of Republic Day celebration.