Paper folding.
Easy.
Making something fly? Harder.
Making something the size of a small bus fly 200 feet? That sounds impossible, probably.
It worked, though.
A crew from Italy’s University of Pisa just broke the Guinness World Record for the largest paper airplane. It happened on June 25 inside a warehouse at the We Make Future expo.
The stats are absurd.
23 feet long.
A 65-foot wingspan.
“Even a piece of paper could become ‘real engineering’ with the right method.”
That was the team’s sentiment, anyway.
The record hadn’t changed since 2013, held by Germany’s Braunschweig Institute. These guys didn’t have the materials for stealth, they had paper and glue. Just those two things.
How did they do it?
Trial. Error. CAD drawings. Lots of it.
YouTuber Jakidale filmed the whole mess, the hours of tweaking and testing that went into “Project Icarus.” If you don’t speak Italian you can still watch the structural madness unfold.
Don’t have the space or the know-how to build your own monster glider?
Good. You probably shouldn’t try.
But maybe fold a normal one.
There’s even a design NASA approves of, sort of.
