Welcome to Pat's Planes!

Welcome to my paper airplane page. As an Aerospace Engineer I have always been very disappointed in how much information is missing or inaccurate in so many paper airplane books. One of the major reasons to build and fly paper airplanes should be to learn as much as we can about how airplanes work. It is also important to learn methods that allow us to do more ourselves. There is no reason that the average person should not be able to learn the basic design characteristics of paper airplanes to the point of being able to make new paper air plane designs as well as improving old designs.

This is one reason that I think Science Fairs are so important. Science fair projects allow us to learn, by experience, both the pure science and the applied methods. I feel that many more students would choose to experiment with paper airplane if they though that they could actually learn any true science from this type of "fun" project. Paper airplanes should never be considered to be a just get by type of science fair project. Unfortunately, the resources currently available to students who are interested in using paper airplanes for a science fair projects are lacking. They either have too little or bad information on the science part, or they can get too deep in the science part for students in the science fair age group. This includes trying to do too much while leaving out the fun part - lots of designs to try.

My purpose is to try to fill some of that gap. I want to create a site that is of value to the true student, yet, is not so filled with facts that the person just looking for something fun gets lost trying to find the airplanes. This site was started on 12-23-07 and is going to go through a lot of changes to get to the point of meeting its goal.

For now I have broken my site into seven main categories on paper airplanes. I also have a plan to research out and provide more educational links to various government and school sites.