A group of students at the University of Pisa has just claimed one of the more delightful engineering trophies in existence: the Guinness World Record for the largest paper airplane ever built and flown. Their creation, called ICARUS, has a wingspan of 20.04 meters (65.8 feet), stretches 7 meters (23 feet) from nose to tail and weighs in at 28.49 kilograms (62.8 pounds).
On a test flight officially certified on June 25 during the We Make Future event at BolognaFiere in Italy, ICARUS glided 59 meters (193.6 feet) — enough to break a record held since 2013 by the Braunschweig Institute of Technology in Germany.
What separates ICARUS from a giant sheet of folded paper is the engineering discipline the students applied to it. They didn't just scale up a classroom dart. The team treated the project like a real airframe design problem, borrowing techniques from conventional aeronautical engineering and adapting them to paper.
The wing has spars and ribs. It has a leading edge and a trailing edge. It has a tail designed to keep the aircraft stable in flight. The paper itself was laminated in sheets and glued into a honeycomb structure — a technique used in real aviation composites — to boost stiffness without piling on weight. Heavier 120 g/m² paper handled structural loads, while lighter 40 g/m² paper served as skin.
All told, the students used roughly 300 kilograms (661 pounds) of paper and about 60 kilograms (132 pounds) of Vinavil Pro glue, some of it thinned with water. They spent months studying, simulating and testing smaller prototypes before committing to the full-scale build.
"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," said science communicator Jacopo D'Alesio, who goes by Jakidale online and helped support the project.
Making ICARUS big enough wasn't enough to earn the Guinness title. To qualify, the plane had to take off from a platform no more than 3 meters (9.8 feet) high, travel at least 15 meters (49 feet) and be launched by a single person. Those rules meant the design had to prioritize stability and efficiency at very low speed — behaving essentially like a giant paper glider.
That is trickier than it sounds. Increase a paper plane's size and its weight scales with the cube of its dimensions while its wing area only scales with the square, so oversized paper aircraft usually collapse under their own weight or stall before they generate lift. The Pisa team addressed the problem by keeping structural density low, distributing loads through the honeycomb geometry, and shaping the wing to optimize lift-to-drag ratio at throwing speed.
"A 20-meter paper airplane may seem useless, and in a sense it is, but it is precisely by pushing things to the edge of engineering, for the sake of the challenge, that progress happens," Jakidale said. "For months we battled humidity, structure, aerodynamics, millimeters, and gravity. Seeing it fly and then crash into the columns at the end of the hangar is proof that it is always worth trying to build the impossible."
That mix of playfulness and rigor is exactly what the project was designed to showcase. Student engineering challenges — from concrete canoes to solar cars — have a long history of teaching real design lessons under conditions absurd enough to make them memorable. ICARUS fits comfortably in that tradition: an object that no one strictly needs, executed with a level of care that turns it into a genuine engineering artifact.
For now, the record belongs to Pisa. Given how much the previous mark inspired new attempts, though, ICARUS may not hold its title forever. Somewhere, another team of students is probably already sketching a bigger, lighter, slower-flying successor on the back of a napkin — which is, in the end, exactly the point.
