World’s largest paper airplane has a 65-foot wingspan

It’s easy to craft a paper airplane capable of soaring across a classroom, but one that can travel 200 feet is a bit harder. A group of students from Italy’s University of Pisa not only managed to reach that distance on a single glide—they did so with the Guinness World Record holder for the largest paper airplane ever assembled. Built using only paper and some glue, the team’s nearly 23-foot-long creation and its over 65-foot wingspan cruised through a warehouse at Italy’s annual We Make Future expo on June 25.

According to the university’s announcement, the students broke a record previously held since 2013 by Germany’s Braunschweig Institute of Technology. “It all started with [constructing] some paper airplanes between lessons, almost as a joke,” the team said in a statement. “We were students convinced that, with the right method, even a piece of paper could become real engineering.”

Science YouTuber Jakidale documented the design process and testing, which highlight the hours of trial and error, CAD renderings, and experimentation needed to pull off their collective success. You can watch the entire exercise in a pair of videos—provided you’re fluent in Italian. But even if you’re not well versed in the Romance language, it’s still fascinating to watch “Project Icarus” come together.

“In the end we managed to bring back to Italy a world record that had stood for thirteen years,” the team added. Don’t have the engineering know-how or enough paper to craft your own gigantic glider? There are still plenty of aeronautically sound paper plane schematics to attempt, including one officially endorsed by NASA.

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