When I was a kid, the record we cared about was flight time, not distance. We'd build planes that would gently circle and throw them straight up in the air. Distance seems to have more to do with the arm, to me.
I grew up in an 10 floor apartment building and I would just fold a few planes and throw them out the window.
Now the interesting thing about a street with tall buildings is that on some perfect days the breeze forms these smooth updrafts along the building walls.
My goal was get the paper plane to catch the updrafts and actually climb up from my 3rd floor to the top of the building. It was very rare, I must have tried 10s of different fold types but sometimes conditions would be just perfect and a particular plane would ride up in circles sometimes even clearing the top floor of the building and then glide down and land sometimes hundreds of meters away or even vanish from view.
When I ran out of planes I would grab my bicycle and go out to recover as many of them possible, come back up and repeat...
John Collins makes more than just distance paper airplanes. He has a nice TED talk about paper airplanes that I found interesting. (Not sure what I think about his opinion of Bernoulli's law though.)
You reminded me of "The Great International Paper Airplane Book" (http://a.co/aCbN01n) .. what a classic.
There is a section in the book on the plane that won the duration contest. More or less a rectangular wing as I recall with just enough forward mass to give it forward movement and just enough dihedral to keep it stable.
