A small crowd gathers in the courtyard by the University of Arizona's Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Building. Squinting into the afternoon sun, all eyes are on a row of engineering students lining a bridge that runs across the courtyard and connects the two halves of the building.

"Team one, go!"

One of the students on the bridge takes a step back and launches a paper airplane into the air. The crowd's eyes follow as the plane briefly soars on a gust of wind, then plunges nose-first into the grass.

Six teams of undergraduate engineering students have come together to compete in this year's Flight Design Challenge as part of Engineering Week hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

The rules are strict and simple. Build a paper plane capable of flying as far as possible, using nothing more than two sheets of legal-sized paper, a few strips of sticky tape and two paper clips – plus any design principles you might have picked up in class. The teams have about 25 minutes to come up with a plane design and 10 minutes to discuss it. No more than three cuts are allowed. Each prototype has to carry a small plastic soldier as payload.

Next up is the Chi-Fighter, a plane sporting a fairly conservative design – a tube-shaped fuselage and a set of broad, rectangular wings.

"We wanted a high aspect ratio aircraft to minimize the drag while offering the lift of the big wing span," explains John Kidd, a fourth-year aerospace engineer and member of the Theta Tau Professional Engineering Fraternity's Chi chapter. "In theory, this design should perform well."

Parker Imperl, a senior in engineering management with a focus on mechanical engineering, adds: "We took one piece of paper and folded it into the wings, and then we cut the tail off what would become the fuselage, and we rolled the  fuselage up really tight."