Via The Huffington Post, I found this story pretty exciting: a Japanese man has made a new world record for the longest duration flight of a paper airplane!
Only one man – Japanese paper airplane virtuoso Takuo Toda – has ever come close to breaking the 30-second barrier. On Sunday, he set a world record for a hand-launched plane made with only paper, but fell just short of the 30-second mark.
Toda, flying a 10-centimeter-long craft of his own design, made 10 attempts to break his own record of 27.9 seconds set earlier this year in Hiroshima but failed to best his previous mark, settling for a 26.1-second flight.
That was still the best ever recorded for a strictly paper-only craft. His 27.9 record was set with a plane that had tape on it.
A lot of engineering can go into paper airplane design, and there are a lot of different styles of airplane with a lot of different flight characteristics. When I was a kid, I had a number of books with both simple and remarkably complicated designs, many of which I can still put together. Congratulations to Takuo Toda!