This is a butterfly case (you know, the kind biologists and collectors create, with dead butterflies mounted on pins), but instead of dead butterflies, I used tiny paper airplanes:

If you want one of these, check out my Etsy store.

The eight airplanes are rather famous: The Supermarine Spitfire was a very popular British fighter plane during WW II. It played a decisive role in the Battle of Britain. The Concorde was the supersonic passenger plane, capable of crossing the Atlantic in 3 hours. The Ryan M-2 was used by Charles Lindbergh for his famous first non-stop flight from New York to Paris. The journey took him 33 hours. The B-29 Superfortress was the plane used to deploy the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Antonov Mriya is the largest transport plane ever built, capable of transporting a payload of 240 tonnes(!). The Wright Flyer, of course, was built by the Wright brothers and was the first motorized airplane. The Fokker DR-I was the plane used by the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen. And the Lockheed Model 10 Electra was Amelia Earhart’s plane when she attempted her flight around the world, which she sadly never finished.

It’s interesting how the history of flight is so tightly linked to the brutal reality of global warfare. I strongly hope that future milestones of technology will be rooted in civilian projects instead.

All planes are about 7cm long, and made by hand from paper. For this project, I had to depart from my habit of publishing the templates, as the planes are quite tricky to make, and they needed a lot of tweaking and experimentation. Templates would not actually work very well.

However, if you absolutely, positively want such a case, I offer it on Etsy. And I’d be happy to take on commissions for custom plane models.