This store is the official way to order the reissued Whitewings paper airplane kits. If you have already placed an order, you can check the order status here.
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$11.99
Do you want to design your own paper airplanes, or do you want to print the downloadable airplanes available in this store? We have the perfect paper for you!
One of the things that sets Whitewings apart from other paper airplanes is the quality of its paper. The paper needs to be lightweight to maximize the performance of the airplanes, but at the same time it needs to be incredibly stiff. This stiffness prevents the airplane surfaces from sagging, bending or fluttering in the wind. This strength-to-weight ratio of the paper is critical, and an optimal value is very hard to find in commercially available paper.
To find the perfect paper, more than 50 different types were tested, from off the shelf brands to custom ordered speciality paper. For each type, we carefully measured the weight, thickness, smoothness, and stiffness. We put all of the data into a spreadsheet, crunched the numbers and found the perfect paper that replicates the strength-to-weigh ratio of the original Whitewings paper from the 1980s. This is a speciality paper that can only be bulk ordered in large 24"x36" sheets, so we have cut these big sheets down into a convenient size that matches the dimensions used for all of the original Whitewings designs.
Paper is made with fibers and the direction of those fibers, called the "grain", affects the stiffness. The grain direction is important because paper is generally stronger in one direction than the other. When printing airplane designs, you should orient the wings so they are aligned with the strong direction. This will give you the best performance. Our paper is provided with the strong direction aligned with the long side of the paper.
Above is a graph of the strength-to-weight ratio for the papers we tested. The closer the paper is to the bottom left corner of the graph, the better. The red dots represent the best paper brands that we tested, the green dots represent samples from the original Whitewings paper from the 1980s and 1990s.