Paper plane designed by Boeing engineers breaks world distance record

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about exciting discoveries, scientific breakthroughs, and more.

CNN
—

It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s a paper plane!

The world record of the furthest flight on a paper plane has been broken by three aerospace engineers with a paper airplane that flew a total of 289 feet, 9 inches (88 meters), almost 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 threesome in south korea. Prior to that, the record had not been broken in over a decade.

“It really put things on the map and it’s a very proud moment for family and friends,” said Dillon Ruble, a systems engineer at Boeing and now a paper airplane record holder. in a launch. “It’s a good link to the aerospace industry and thinking along the lines of design and prototyping.”

Ruble worked alongside Garrett Jensen, a power engineer also at Boeing, and aerospace engineer Nathaniel Erickson. The trio are recent graduates who studied aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

The feat required months of effort, as the team put in nearly 500 hours of origami and aerodynamics study to create and test multiple prototypes. Engineers put their final design to the test on December 2, 2022 at Crown Point, Indiana, where Ruble’s record third launch was achieved.

“We expect this record to stand for quite some time – 290 feet (88 meters) is unrealistic,” Jensen said in the statement. “That’s 14 to 15 feet (4.2 to 4.6 meters) above the farthest launch we’ve ever thrown. It took a lot of planning and a lot of skill to break 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 great distance in a short amount of time.

Gathering inspiration from various hypersonic aircraftvehicles that can fly faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), specifically the NASA X-43Athe team had come up with the winning paper airplane design, later called the “Mach 5”.

“Large-scale and paper airplanes have vast differences 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 would theorize about a crease we could change in our plane, fold it, throw it, and compare the distance to previous iterations to determine if the change was beneficial.”

To find the best technique for launching the paper plane, the team ran several simulations and analyzed slow-motion videos of their previous launches.

“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. “Simulations were needed to figure that out. I didn’t think we could get any useful data from a simulation on a paper airplane. Turns out we could.”

Even down to the paper, which the team had decided A4 (slightly longer than typical letter-size paper) was best for handling and folding into the winning plane. With these meticulously thought out design choices and careful 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-breaking distance flight, the plane was airborne for approximately six seconds. The Guinness paper airplane record for the duration of the flight currently it is 29.2 seconds.

“The design goals for an airtime record would be very different from the low drag version we built for the longest distance record,” Ruble said by email. “Increasing the wingspan and decreasing the aspect ratio would be the first steps in producing this type of aircraft.”

Paper airplane aside, Ruble added that this tedious method of round-trip testing 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 high school, participating in paper airplane events held at Boeing. Ruble said she enjoyed making the paper come to life and the hard work she put in to find ways to improve her designs. Both of them were also fans of origami when they were children.

The record-breaking team hopes their achievement will inspire other young and aspiring aerospace engineers to pursue their dreams.

For those looking to create their own record-breaking paper airplane design, the feat isn’t impossible, but it can take some time (and skill).

“Mach 5 flies best at a high relative speed, but to achieve this condition, the plane must be launched in a specific way,” Ruble said by email. “This technique, in addition to the complexity of the plane, means that only the most experienced paper airplane enthusiast 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.