Italian Engineering Students Built The Largest Paper Plane In History
What started as a few paper airplanes between exam sessions at the University of Pisa has become the largest paper aircraft ever built, a Guinness World Record, and one of the most joyful engineering stories of the year. A team of 16 aerospace engineering students from Pisa, working with Italian science communicator and content creator Jakidale, spent months designing and hand-building a plane called ICARUS, named after the mythological figure who flew too close to the sun, because the students said they were inspired by his flight rather than deterred by his fall. The finished aircraft, made entirely from paper and glue without any metal, wood, or other structural material, has a wingspan of 20.04 metres, roughly the width of six London double-decker buses placed end to end, a length of 7 metres, and weighs just over 28 kilograms. The previous record, a wingspan of 18.21 metres held since 2013 by Germany's Braunschweig Institute of Technology, was already large by any reasonable standard. ICARUS beat it by nearly two full metres on every dimension.
The official certification came on June 25th at the WMF, We Make Future technology fair in Bologna, where Guinness World Records adjudicator Lorenzo Veltri watched as one student climbed a three-metre scaffold platform, balanced ICARUS on his palms, sprinted the full length of the platform, and flung the plane into the air of a large aeroplane hangar. It glided steadily down the length of the building before its nose collided gently with a row of columns at the far end, having flown 59 metres. Jakidale, who described watching it fly as genuinely moving, said the project was proof that pushing things to the edge of engineering for the sake of the challenge is always worth it, and that seeing it fly and then crash into the columns at the end was proof that it is worth trying to build the impossible. The team faced unexpected obstacles throughout the build, including managing the effects of humidity on paper, which expands and compresses with moisture in ways that compromised surface adhesion and structural alignment, requiring them to monitor working conditions constantly while assembling dozens of separate sections into a single flyable whole. The record now belongs to Italy for the first time, and to a team of students who initially considered the whole thing a joke.
