The perfect paper aeroplane imitates the shape of an aerofoil, writes Will Pavia. “Slightly rounded on top and flattish underneath,” says Paul Stevenson, a lecturer at the faculty of engineering at Surrey University. "The shape of an aeroplane’s wing."

Paper aeroplanes do not have to follow this model, however. At the European space company Astrium, Dr Elie Allouis, a mission systems engineer for the Future Science programme, and a closet paper aeroplane fanatic, tells TimesOnline: “They don’t have to - you can make a quick and dirty plane like a dart, for instance, but if they do then that’s great, because that’s what makes a wing fly.

“You get that most of the time anyway because you are folding paper, but there is an incredible variety of designs. You have the dart type of model. You have broad-winged craft and then there are circular types of aeroplane which look almost like a tube – an example of this is the ‘Napkin Paper Airplane’ on the website paperairplanes.co.uk.”

Dr Allouis’s personal fleet of paper aeroplanes numbers ten. “They are variations on what I have seen elsewhere,” he says. His background is in aerospace as well as space engineering, and he is fascinated by the way paper aeroplanes can test the same factors faced by larger scale craft.

According to Mr Stevenson, the Japanese space aeroplanes experiment will mimic the gravitational experiment performed by Galileo to show that objects of a different mass fall at the same speed. “Normally you have atmosphere in the way, but in space a paper aeroplane will drop rather quickly. By the time it reaches the earth’s atmosphere it will be going rather quickly – there will be a danger of it burning up. But because it’s light it will start slowing down as soon as it touches even the most rarefied areas of atmosphere.”

In this sense the paper aeroplanes provide a useful model to inspire future lighter craft: “The most recent shuttle disaster was caused by problems with heat resistant tiles,” he said. Lighter craft which nonetheless have a larger surface area should slow down more gradually.

“You need to maximise surface area and decrease mass,” says Dr Allouis. This appears to be true of both paper aeroplanes and spacecraft attempting slow re-entry. “The recent winner of the X-Prize (a competition for a non-government organisation to design a reusable space craft) is not a blunt object coming down to earth.”

Dr Allouis’s Paper Aeroplane Tips

* “Load the nose”: in other words, ensure the nose is weighted. “That usually tends to make it more stable in flight.”

* “Wing tips (folding the end of the wings up) are good to prevent vortices – it helps the plane avoid downdraft and makes it more stable.”

* Mimic the aerofoil: “Tend towards a round nose and a squashed trailing edge.”

* Copy what is already out there: a good range of plane designs are provided by paperairplanes.co.uk and paperplane.org. For the extremely dedicated, amazingpaperairplanes.com provides designs for planes that mimic real-life aircraft.

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