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It's a bird … it's a plane … it's a paper plane!
The world record for the Flight furthest by paper plane was broken by three aerospace engineers with a paper plane which made a large total of 289 feet, 9 inches (88 meters), almost the length of an American football field.
They broke the previous 252 -foot, 7 inch (77 meter) record reached in April 2022 by A trio in South Korea. Before that, the file had not been beaten in more than a decade.
“It really put things on the menu and it's a really proud moment for family and friends,” said Dillon Ruble, systems engineer at Boeing and now the holder of the paper plane record, in a press release. “It is a good link with aerospace and reflection in the sense of design and creation of prototypes.”
Rouble worked alongside Garrett Jensen, a force engineer also with Boeing, and the aerospace engineer Nathaniel Erickson. The trio is recent graduates who have studied aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.
The feat required months of effort, while the team carried out almost 500 hours studying origami and aerodynamics to create and test several prototypes. The engineers put their final conception to the test on December 2, 2022 in Crown Point, in Indiana, where the record was made during the third launch of the ruble.
“We hope that this record represents a certain time – 290 feet (88 meters) is unreal,” Jensen said in the press release. “It is 14 to 15 feet (4.2 to 4.6 meters) compared to the most distant launch that we have ever done. It took a lot of planning and a lot of skills to break the previous record.”
The team had decided that their best chance of breaking the world record would be with an airplane design that focused on the speed and the trail minimized, so that the plane could travel a distance from a distance in a short time.
Inspired by various Hypersonic planesvehicles which can fly faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), in particular the NASA X-43AThe team had created the design of winning paper aircraft – later named “Mach 5.”
“Large-scale and paper planes have large differences in their complexity, but both work on the same fundamental principles,” said Ruble, by e-mail. “Some of the same design methodologies can be applied to both. One of these methods was our test design and error process.
To find the best technique with regard to the launch of the paper aircraft, the team has led various simulations and analyzed videos in slow motion of their previous throws.
“We have found that the optimal angle is about 40 degrees from the ground. Once you are targeting it as high, you launch as strong as possible. This gives us our best distance,” Jensen said in the press release. “It took simulations to understand this. I didn't think we could get useful data from a simulation on a paper plane. It turns out that we could. ”
Even until the newspaper, that the team had decided that 4 (slightly longer than the typical letter size paper) was the best to manipulate and fall back on the winning plane. With these meticulously thought out design choices and special attention to the many rules and directives set out by the Guinness World Record team, the three had to break a record.
On its record remote flight, the plane was in the air for about six seconds. The Guinness paper plane record for the duration of the flight is currently 29.2 seconds.
“The design lenses of an air time recording would be very different from the low dragl version that we built for the longest record,” said Ruble by e-mail. “The increase in the strap and the decrease in appearance ratio would be the first stages of the production of this type of plan.”
Aside from the paper plane, Ruble added that this tedious method of back and forth tests testified to the importance of rigorous prototyping in the real world.
Rouble and Jensen started their paper airplane engineering careers during their stay in college, participating in paper plane events held in Boeing. Ruble said he liked to give life to the newspaper and the hard work he had to do to find ways to improve his creations. Both were also origami fans as children.
The Record team hopes that their accomplishment will inspire other young aerospace engineers to chase their dreams.
For those who seek to create their own design of record paper plan, the feat is not impossible, but can take some time (and skills).
“Mach 5 steals the best at a high speed speed, but to reach this condition, the aircraft must be launched in a specific way,” said Ruble by email. “This technique, in addition to the complexity of the plane, means that only lovers of the most experienced paper would have success with design.
“However, starting with conceptions accessible to the public, anyone can perfect their skills to launch paper planes further and more than all their friends,” he added.
