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It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s a paper plane!
The world record for the the farthest flight by paper plane it was broken by three aerospace engineers with a paper airplane that flew a total of 289 feet, 9 inches (88 meters), nearly the length of an American football field.
They beat the previous record of 252 feet, 7 inches (77 meters) achieved in April 2022 by a trio in South Korea. Before that, the record had not been broken in over a decade.
“It really put things on the map and it’s a really proud moment for family and friends,” said Dillon Ruble, a Boeing systems engineer and now the paper airplane record holder. in a release. “It’s a good link with aerospace and thinking along the lines of design and prototyping.”
Ruble worked with Garrett Jensen, a power engineer also with Boeing, and aerospace engineer Nathaniel Erickson. The trio are recent graduates who studied aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology.
The feat required months of effort, as the team spent nearly 500 hours studying origami and aerodynamics to create and test several prototypes. Engineers put their final design to the test on December 2, 2022, in Crown Point, Indiana, where the record was achieved in Ruble’s third launch.
“We hope this record stands for a long time – 290 feet (88 meters) is unreal,” Jensen said in the release. “It’s 14 to 15 feet (4.2 to 4.6 meters) over the farthest shot we’ve ever made. It took a lot of planning and a lot of skill to beat the previous record.”
The team had decided that their best chance of breaking the world record would be with an aircraft design that focused on speed and minimized drag, so that the aircraft could fly a long distance in a short amount of time.
Gather inspiration from different hypersonic aircraftvehicles that can fly faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), especially the NASA X-43Athe team had come up with the winning paper airplane design – later named the “Mach 5”.
“Large-scale and paper airplanes have a big difference in their complexity, but both operate on the same fundamental principles,” Ruble said via email. “Some of the same design methodologies can be applied to both. One of these methods was our trial and error design process. For example, we will theorize about a fold that we can change in our plane, fold, throw, and compare the distance with previous iterations to determine if the change was beneficial.”
To find the best technique when it came to throwing paper airplanes, the team performed various simulations and analyzed slow-motion videos of their previous throws.
“We found that the optimal angle is about 40 degrees from the ground. Once you aim that high, you throw as hard as possible. That gives us our best distance,” Jensen said in the statement. “It took simulations to figure this out. I didn’t think we could get useful data from a simulation on a paper airplane. It turns out we can.”
Even down to the paper, which the team had decided that A4 (a bit longer than typical paper) was the best to handle and fold into the winning plane. With these meticulously thought out design choices, and paying attention to the many rules and guidelines set by the Guinness World Record Team, the three were set to break a record.
In its record distance flight, the plane was in the air for about six seconds. The Guinness paper airplane record for the duration of the flight it is currently 29.2 seconds.
“The design goals for an air time record would be very different from the low-drag version we built for the longest distance record,” Ruble said via email. “Increasing the wingspan and decreasing the aspect ratio would be the first steps in the production of this type of aircraft.”
Aside from the paper airplane, Ruble added that this tedious method of back-and-forth trials served as a testament to the importance of rigorous prototyping in the real world.
Ruble and Jensen began their paper airplane engineering careers while in middle school, participating in paper airplane events held at Boeing. Ruble said that he liked to make the paper come to life and the hard work he had to do to find ways to improve his designs. Both were also fans of origami since childhood.
The record-breaking team hopes their achievement will inspire other young and aspiring aerospace engineers to pursue their dreams.
For those who want to create their own design of the record paper plane, the fact is not impossible, but it may take some time (and skill).
“Mach 5 flies best at high relative speed, but to achieve this condition, the aircraft must be launched in a specific way,” Ruble said via email. “This technique, in addition to the complexity of the plane, means that only the most experienced paper plane enthusiasts would be successful with the design.
“However, by starting with publicly available designs, anyone can hone their skills to launch paper airplanes farther and higher than all their friends,” he added.
