Chinese Students Set World Record by Building the World's Largest Remote-Controlled Paper Airplane

(Digital Itla) A team of high school students in China recently set a Guinness World Record by building the world's largest remote-controlled paper airplane. According to media reports, a group of students from Shenzhen Zhili Middle School designed a gigantic yet fully functional RC paper aircraft after nearly six months of hard work. Featuring a massive wingspan of 6.06 meters and a fuselage length of 5.06 meters, the world's largest RC paper plane was successfully flight-tested earlier this month. The aircraft stayed airborne for about 15 minutes before executing a successful landing. The project's chief designer and pilot, Zhou Junjie, told reporters: "We wanted to take the most basic principles of a paper airplane and combine them with engineering technology to build a stable and exceptionally large model." Last October, Zhou and his team won the championship at the China International Aircraft Design Challenge and broke a national record, giving them the confidence to pursue an even bigger project, including setting a new Guinness World Record. After researching and confirming that no 6-meter model existed in the field of unmanned remote-controlled paper aircraft at the time, they set a new goal to build the largest RC paper airplane ever. Zhou Guyun, an instructor at the school's model aircraft club, told reporters that the biggest challenge of the project was actually its "exceptionally large" scale. He added that in ultra-large aircraft, every 1-degree change in the wing surface and every single centimeter of shift in the center of gravity directly impacts lift and stability. Although the average age of the core team members was just 16 years, they overcame engineering challenges that would be considered difficult even for adult professionals in the aeronautical field.