Just think about it.  How many paper airplanes have you made over the course of your life?  That number’s got to be thousands, right?  And how far can you get them to fly?  A few feet?  Across the room?  Takuo Toda scoffs at your paper aerodynamic achievements.  That’s because the Japanese chairman of the Japan Origami Airplane Association broke a Guinness world record with a paper airplane flight of 29.7 seconds.

Of course, to Toda-san that’s nothing.  His real goal, and one he’s been pushing for since 1979, is to launch a paper airplane from space back to Earth.  He believes (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is studying this now) that because of the design of his paper airplanes that they can travel safely to Earth from the International Space Station.  I guess you can do anything with origami!

His airplane and the Space Shuttle NASA uses have the same design, so there might be something to his crazy-sounding theory.  Why they don’t just send some paper airplanes up on the next shuttle mission and throw them at Earth?  I don’t know; apparently you can’t just do these things without spending a few million yen to do a feasibility study.  Paper is pretty cheap these days, Japan; you could probably just wing this one.

Get it?  Airplane?  Wing?  Ha!

Tags: world’s longest paper airplane flight, Guinness World Records, world record paper airplane, 29.7 second paper airplane flight, paper airplanes from space, Takuo Toda

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