"All right. Who threw that?" he rasped. No one, of course. "You'll all be in trouble unless the culprit owns up." Solidarity from members of rival paper squadrons. Us, shop one of our jocks, aces among them? You must be joking, Fritz. Do your worst. Your stalags. Your firing squads. You won't break us." "All right, then you're all in detention ..."
Paper planes have always been more than they seem. To my generation of English schoolchildren of the 60s and 70s, they were a form of unfettered, classroom-buzzing exuberance. They were the Spitfires and Messerschmitts of our high-flying imagination. We mass-produced them on a scale that made the war efforts of Max Beaverbrook seem like child's play.
Mostly it was the boys who made and flew paper planes, although there was always an Amy Johnson among us who could cut the air with a more than convincing paper dart.
The extraordinary thing is that these childhood paper darts were true aircraft. Very quickly we learned that by folding sheets of paper even more crisply, they would fly faster and with greater precision. Later we learned that flaps and ailerons could make all the difference. A foil milk bottle top pressed tightly to the nose of a paper plane could radically increase its airspeed and send it careering into sensational dives. Longer, swept-back wings could sustain flight above the two or three second mark. A higher grade of slightly thicker paper than we had ready access to - tearing the pages from exercise books - allowed flights of epic duration.
Making paper planes for children today, and getting them to make faster and more aerobatic designs than mine, I have often wondered what came first, paper darts or the notion of man-made flight. The answer is that no one really knows. Leonardo Da Vinci and many other inventors between his death and the Wright brothers' first 39...#8209;metre flight from the sands of Kitty Hawk in 1903, thought very much indeed about the nature of flying, and many brave men lost their lives in the attempt to lift a heavier-than-air-machine into the skies. And yet the paper plane - the one we know as schoolchildren - is a late invention.
Today, paper planes have become very sophisticated indeed. The world record for a paper-plane flight is, I think, still held by Ken Blackburn, a US aerospace engineer. Blackburn's first entry into the Guinness Book of Records was in 1985. A student at North Carolina State University, he got a paper plane to fly indoors (and thus without assistance from tail winds) for 16.89 seconds. This might not seem very long, but try it. A flight by paper plane across a garden over the head of the family dog, or through a classroom into a pompous teacher's head (yeah!) lasts just a few seconds indeed. Now look at the second hand of your watch, and imagine a paper plane scything through the air for nearly 17 seconds; it is, as you will understand, a very long time for a machine lacking a Rolls-Royce Merlin under its paper nose.
Working as an engineer on the US F-18 fighter jet, Blackburn then beat his own record, inside the Georgia Dome, Atlanta, in 1987 when his latest paper plane flew for an astonishing 27.6 seconds. We're talking level flight here, by the way. Some achievement.
With Jeff Lammers, a mechanical engineer, Blackburn published The World Record Paper Airplane Book, which allows any one of us a chance to have a go to beat the record. The joy of such attempts at record breaking are manifold. It is cheap. Anyone with access to a sheet of paper can have a go. It's safe. There will be many accidents on the way, but no matter how often your latest designs smash into the ground, no one will ever be hurt.
We're talking here, of course, of purist paper darts made from a single sheet of folded paper. Taken as a whole, paper planes have become ever more popular, and more available, than they once were. Today, however, the planes you can buy, very cheaply, in newsagents are not necessarily the real thing, or the Wright stuff. In the garden last weekend, for example, I had a large number of machines ready to fly with a squadron of eager infant pilots. The Super Stunter, a British-made paper plane, come in packets of three for £4. Each flies beautifully, performing eye-boggling aerobatic stunts, delighting children and dogs alike. But, Super Stunters are a bit of a cheat: they are constructed from two sheets of lightweight card. These types of aircraft are quite effective in sub-five second flights, but no match for one of Ken Blackburn's single-sheet paper darts for serious endurance.
Many pilots indeed have toyed, and experimented, with paper planes as children, and even as adults. Only the other week I attended a meeting to save RAF Bentley Priory, Middlesex, for the nation. Due to close in July, this was Lord Dowding's command headquarters for the duration of the Battle of Britain. One of "Stuffy" Dowding's young pilots, and fellow committee members, was former Squadron Leader Cyril Stanley "Bam" Bamberger (DFC and two bars), a Battle of Britain veteran and world war two "ace" who had a crack at one of the Luftwaffe's Me 262 jet fighters from his Spitfire in 1945. Did he fly paper planes as a child?
"Yes, I did; and I remembered my two best designs to hand on to my four children and seven grandchildren. The one with the heaviest nose flies best."
A paper plane allows every one of us to be - even if for just a few seconds - a latter-day Leonardo Da Vinci, or Orville or Wilbur Wright. You'll believe a sheet of paper can fly, even into the pages of the Guinness Book of Records.