The record-breaking team hopes their accomplishment will inspire other young and aspiring aerospace engineers to chase their dreams.We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post. Ruble said he enjoyed making the paper come to life and the hard work he had to put in to find ways to improve his designs. Ruble and Jensen began their paper plane engineering careers while in middle school, participating in paper airplane events held at Boeing. Paper airplane aside, Ruble added that this tedious method of back-and-forth trials served as a testament to the importance of rigorous prototyping in the real world.įrom origami enthusiasts to aerospace engineers “Increasing the wingspan and decreasing the aspect ratio would be the first steps in producing this type of plane.” “The design objectives for an air-time record would be vastly different from the low-drag version we built for the longest-distance record,” Ruble said via email. The Guinness paper plane record for duration of flight is currently 29.2 seconds. On its record-breaking distance flight the plane was in the air for roughly six seconds. ![]() Repeating radio signal leads astronomers to an Earth-size exoplanet Alice Kitterman/National Science Foundation Plasma emitted from the star is deflected by the exoplanet's magnetic field then interacts with the star's magnetic field, resulting in an aurora on the star and the emission of radio waves. With these meticulously thought-out design choices, and careful attention to the numerous rules and guidelines set forth by the Guinness World Record Team, the three were set to break a record.Īn artist's conceptual rendering of interactions between a prospective exoplanet and its star. Turns out, we could.”Įven down to the paper, which the team had decided that A4 (slightly longer than typical letter sized paper) was the best for manipulating and folding into the winning airplane. I didn’t think we could get useful data from a simulation on a paper airplane. That gives us our best distance,” Jensen said in the statement. Once you’re aiming that high, you throw as hard as possible. ![]() “We found the optimal angle is about 40 degrees off the ground. To find the best technique when it came to throwing the paper airplane, the team ran various simulations and analyzed slow-motion videos of their previous throws. The engineers had to pay careful attention to the numerous rules and guidelines set forth by the Guinness World Record Team. Ruble (from left) and Erickson fold their paper airplanes with witnesses overseeing. For instance, we would theorize about a fold we could change on our plane, fold it, throw it, and compare the distance to previous iterations to determine if the change was beneficial.” ![]() One of these methods was our trial-and-error design process. “Some of the same design methodologies can be applied to both. “Full-scale and paper airplanes have vast differences in their complexity, but both operate on the same fundamental principles,” said Ruble, via email. Gathering inspiration from various hypersonic aircrafts, vehicles that can fly faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), specifically the NASA X-43A, the team had come up with the winning paper aircraft design - later named “Mach 5.” The team had decided their best chance at beating the world record would be with an airplane design that focused on speed and minimized drag, so that the plane could fly a far distance in a short amount of time. It took a lot of planning and a lot of skill to beat the previous record.” “That’s 14 to 15 feet (4.2 to 4.6 meters) over the farthest throw we ever did. “We hope this record stands for quite a while - 290 feet (88 meters) is unreal,” Jensen said in the release. The engineers put their final design to the test on December 2, 2022, in Crown Point, Indiana, where the record was achieved on Ruble’s third throw. The feat required months of effort, as the team put in nearly 500 hours of studying origami and aerodynamics to create and test multiple prototypes. ![]() The trio are recent graduates who studied aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Ruble worked alongside Garrett Jensen, a strength engineer also with Boeing, and aerospace engineer Nathaniel Erickson. Nathan Erickson (from left), Dillon Ruble and Garrett Jensen are aerospace engineers turned world record holders with their paper plane design inspired from hypersonic vehicles.
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