Gotta crumple it as tightly as possible. A loose paper ball isn’t gonna go anywhere but a tight one will go far. It’s all about maximizing cross sectional density!
A good plane required mathematical precision, not fanciness. In theory they take about a minute to make. The son did not make a mathematically precise plane.
I'd argue it's perfectly acceptable English to say "The rock that was launched by the catapult flew through the air" or "That rock went flying" or "there were bullets flying in all directions" or "the baseball went flying through the air". Etc.
Sure, but then you couldn't mess with a kid, and that's against dad code.
Joking aside, dad jokes and puns, and silly arguments like this would be actually serve a purpose other than it being hilarious. Just like you presented a perfectly valid argument to counter the one I was using, most kids are going to come up with something just as valid, if not that exact one.
Then, when you reject it on whatever grounds are funniest, they are probably going to come up with another.
This process, depending on the kid, can go on for a few cycles.
As long as you're paying attention and not making it a thing, they're stretching their brains a little in the face of absurdities. They're also going to be figuring out how to frame arguments in a constructive way, since you're the parent and there's a barrier to the usual reactionary irritation behaviors they might use with a peer their own age.
Again, you have to watch how you're doing it and not take it too far, as well as keeping it silly enough that it won't register as some kind of dick swinging. But it's a really fun way to build critical thinking, people handling, and do so while having fun and bonding.
My kid sometimes just rolls their eyes and nopes the fuck out, but when they are in the mood, we can go for an hour playing games with words and ideas like that.
The atoms that went into the paper that made my plane originally were blasted out of a supernova at relativistic speeds billions of years before becoming part of the cloud of dust and gas that coalesced into the Earth, which eventually developed life, which evolved into trees, some which were eventually chopped down and pulped and turned into paper, and then I took one of those pieces of paper and folded into a paper airplane and got on the same flight you did but I win because I FLEW FIRST CLASS, BITCH.