A team of high school pupils in China has set a Guinness World Record after building the world’s largest remote-controlled paper aircraft.
A group of students from Shenzhen Zhili Middle School spent nearly six months constructing a giant yet fully functional RC paper aircraft. The aircraft, featuring a wingspan of 6.06 metres and a fuselage measuring 5.06 metres in length, underwent a successful test flight earlier this month. It remained airborne for nearly 15 minutes before landing safely.
Chief designer and pilot Zhu Junjie told reporters the team wished to apply the most basic principles of paper aircraft design and combine them with engineering technology to create a stable and unusually large model.
Last October, Zhu and his team secured the championship in the China International Aircraft Design Challenge and also broke a national record, giving them the confidence to pursue a larger project aimed at setting a new Guinness World Record.
After conducting research and confirming that no unmanned remote-controlled paper aircraft measuring six metres had previously existed, the team set themselves the goal of building the largest RC paper aircraft ever produced.
Zhu Guiyun, instructor of the school’s model aircraft club, said the greatest challenge of the project lay in its unusually large size. He added that in extremely large aircraft, every one-degree change in wing surface angle and every one-centimetre shift in the centre of gravity directly affects lift and stability.
Although the average age of the core team members was only 16, they overcame engineering challenges considered difficult even for adult professionals in the field of aeronautics.
