www.popsci.com15%
World’s largest paper airplane has a 65-foot wingspan 17%
By Andrew Paul22%
7/9/2026, 7:49:39 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 13 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Halo Effect, and Availability Heuristic, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 35.1% saturation with 102 hits. Analysis detected 360 faulty-reasoning hits from 291 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 32.8% and a BS Rank of 17% (18,157 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 83.00% of the article peer group.
It’s easy to craft a paper airplane capable of soaring across a classroom , but one that can travel 200 feet is a bit harder.
A group of students from Italy’s University of Pisa not only managed to reach that distance on a single glide—they did so with the Guinness World Record holder for the largest paper airplane ever assembled.
Built using only paper and some glue, the team’s nearly 23-foot-long creation and its over 65-foot wingspan cruised through a warehouse at Italy’s annual We Make Future expo on June 25.
According to the university’s announcement, the students broke a record previously held since 2013 by Germany’s Braunschweig Institute of Technology.
“It all started with [constructing] some paper airplanes between lessons, almost as a joke,” the team said in a statement.
“We were students convinced that, with the right method, even a piece of paper could become real engineering.”
Science YouTuber Jakidale documented the design process and testing, which highlight the hours of trial and error, CAD renderings, and experimentation needed to pull off their collective success.
You can watch the entire exercise in a pair of videos—provided you’re fluent in Italian.
But even if you’re not well versed in the Romance language, it’s still fascinating to watch “Project Icarus” come together.
“In the end we managed to bring back to Italy a world record that had stood for thirteen years,” the team added.
Don’t have the engineering know-how or enough paper to craft your own gigantic glider?
There are still plenty of aeronautically sound paper plane schematics to attempt, including one officially endorsed by NASA .
The post World’s largest paper airplane has a 65-foot wingspan appeared first on Popular Science .
Speakers
4speakers34%attributed speech192writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageGuinness World Record holder
35 attributed words35% of attributed speech84% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.