Paper airplane designed by engineers breaks world distance record
(just in from cnn): The world record for the farthest flight by paper airplane has been broken by three aerospace engineers with a paper aircraft that flew a grand total of 289 feet, 9 inches (88 meters), nearly the length of an American football field. The feat required months of effort, as the team put in nearly 500 hours of studying origami and aerodynamics to create and test multiple prototypes. The engineers put their final design to the test on December 2, 2022, in Crown Point, Indiana, where the record was achieved on their third throw.
The team had decided their best chance at beating the world record would be with an airplane design that focused on speed and minimized drag, so that the plane could fly a far distance in a short amount of time.
To find the best technique when it came to throwing the paper airplane, the team ran various simulations and analyzed slow-motion videos of their previous throws.
“We found the optimal angle is about 40 degrees off the ground. Once you’re aiming that high, you throw as hard as possible. That gives us our best distance. It took simulations to figure that out. I didn’t think we could get useful data from a simulation on a paper airplane. Turns out, we could.”
Even down to the paper, which the team had decided that A4 (slightly longer than typical letter sized paper) was the best for manipulating and folding into the winning airplane. With these meticulously thought-out design choices, and careful attention to the numerous rules and guidelines set forth by the Guinness World Record Team, the three were set to break a record.