World’s Largest Paper Airplane With a 66-Foot Wingspan Just Flew Into the Record Books

Italian students turned a paper and glue craft into a remarkably serious aircraft.

Almost everyone has folded a sheet of paper into an airplane, thrown it across a classroom or playground, and watched it either glide beautifully or, if you’re more like yours truly, dive straight into the floor.

Now, a group of engineering students in Italy took this pastime to an absurd extreme. They built a paper airplane nearly 66 feet (20 meters) across, carried it onto a raised platform and launched it by hand.

And it flew.

The aircraft, named Icarus, traveled 194 feet — about 50 meters — through an exhibition hall in Bologna on June 25. Guinness World Records certified it as the largest paper aircraft ever flown.

The University of Pisa team built the plane entirely from paper and glue. It measured 7 meters long with a wingspan of 20.04 meters (≈66 ft) and weighed 28.49 kilograms (≈63 lbs), according to the University of Pisa’s account of the project.

“It all started with a few paper planes between lectures,” the group said in a statement to Guinness World Records. “We were students convinced that, with the right approach, even a piece of paper could become real engineering.”

At ordinary scale, a paper airplane is simple to make. You only need a few folds to create wings out of stiff paper, and a good throw supplies the required momentum.

Understandably, at 20 meters across, things get a bit more complicated. Paper bends under its own weight so long paper wings twist. Humidity softens the structure. Even a small imbalance can cause the airplane-shaped paper structure to pitch forward, stall or turn sideways before it gains enough lift.

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The students therefore had to treat Icarus less like a craft project and more like a conventional glider.

Paper Airplane Wider Than a Boeing 737’s Cabin

Inside the aircraft, the team built spars and ribs similar to those found in full-size airplane wings. They added a leading edge, a trailing edge and a tail intended to keep the glider stable.

They also glued paper into honeycomb structures, a design that increases stiffness without adding the weight of a solid block. The stronger sections used heavier paper, while thinner sheets covered the exterior.

The team said it consumed roughly 300 kilograms of paper and 60 kilograms of glue during development, although the finished aircraft weighed only 28.49 kilograms.

Italian science communicator Jacopo D’Alesio, known online as Jakidale, helped organize and document the effort.

“When I met the guys from Pisa, I fell in love with a seemingly crazy idea: using paper and glue and the same logic used to design a passenger jet wing to build something that had never existed before,” Jakidale said.

Before attempting Icarus, the group used MATLAB simulations to estimate how a full-size aircraft might behave. It then built several prototypes.

The first, called Prometheus, helped the students identify the internal supports they would need. An eight-meter model named Daedalus tested whether paper and glue alone could hold such a structure together. A smaller four-meter aircraft showed that the basic design could actually glide.

“Months of study, simulations, mistakes and fresh starts, and in the end, this giant piece of paper took a record from the Germans that had stood since 2013,” the team told Guinness World Records.

One Person Still Had to Throw It

Building the world’s widest paper aircraft did not automatically earn the record. Guinness required the plane to take off from a platform no more than 3 meters high, travel at least 15 meters and be launched by a single person.

At the We Make Future expo in Bologna, a team member ran along a scaffolding platform and pushed Icarus into the air. The plane floated above the crowd and traveled nearly four times the minimum distance before descending.

It surpassed the previous wingspan record of 18.21 meters, set in 2013 by students at Germany’s Braunschweig Institute of Technology.

“Watching Icarus travel the length of that hangar was genuinely moving,” Guinness adjudicator Lorenzo Veltri said after the flight. “These guys earned their place in the record books.”