How to Fold the Original Ninja Looping Paper Airplane

This is the original Ninja Super Looper designed by Carmel D Morris from her book, The Best Advanced Paper Aircraft. This model has been used in many other books including Klutz, however this craft does bigger loops and can be carried away on a breeze because it has the original reverse wing fold others have ignored and that makes for a more stable flight. Follow the next steps carefully. Make sure you have Letter or A4 paper (photocopy paper is ideal).

This base fold is common and is used in many paper plane designs.

• Make all the crease folds first. Note the dot-dash line; this means the paper is folded behind. The sides come together. This is better explained in the photos.

Photos:

• The best way to bring the sides together is to have the paper upside down; push into the center where the creases intersect and the sides will pop up. You can then easily bring the sides together, and swing the top edge down.
• Make sure symmetry is good.

In the next step we will make the forward wings...

Sub-steps 4-9 show the foward (narrow) wing section.

• The upper righthand flap is swung to the left and the edge underneath is folded to the left, then the upper flap is swung back to the right. Mirror this procedure for the left side and you get what is shown in image '6'. The arrow with the loop on it means turn the paper over.
• Fold the nose down (image '7') and then back up (image '8').
• Now fold the model in half.

Almost there! The next steps show how to fold the main wing section...

This step is crucial...

• Fold down the wings at the angle shown; the fold must not go below the underside flaps or the craft will stall. Crease well.
• Keep the wings near-level, just a slight upwards angle of around 10 degrees as you view the craft from behind.
• Add slight tail lift at the wing trailing edge corners if the craft fails to loop.

This model can be found on the YouTube channel Paper Plane Lab with a bunch of other neat models.

The book, The Best Advanced Paper Aircraft Book 1 is available from Amazon.

Happy Flying!

Dwight and Carmel