Origami fan's paper planes soar into the record books

Published on Sunday 27 December 2009 22:02

WITH a dramatic flick of his wrist and twist of his torso, a Japanese engineer launched his paper plane on a world record breaking flight yesterday which saw his hand-folded construction airborne for 26.1 seconds.

Using a paper plane specially designed and folded to attempt the world's longest flight, Takuo Toda said his 10cm flying machine was a triumph.

Mr Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima, but achieved with a plane that was held together with tape.

The flight, inside a Japan Airlines hangar near Haneda airport in Tokyo, was the longest by a model free from glue or tape.

Speaking after the successful fly-off, Mr Toda, who has developed 700 different designs for paper airplanes, said he was delighted with the result – adding he was still keen to pursue his dream of a 30-second flight. He said: "I felt a lot of pressure. Everything is a factor – the moisture in the air, the temperature, the crowd."

Mr Toda said the record was all the more satisfying for having been achieved with a plane that stayed true to the traditions of origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. He folded his 10cm aircraft by hand from a single sheet of paper and did not use scissors or glue.

Mr Toda, who is president of the Japan Origami Aeroplane Association, said the secret to a successful launch was to avoid a flat trajectory and get the plane as high in the air as possible to give it time to circle slowly towards terra firma. "It's really a sport," he said. "The throwing technique is very delicate."

Mr Toda has established himself as the world's foremost folder of paper planes, an obsession that now has him setting his sights on the final frontier.

Last year, he and fellow enthusiast Shinji Suzuki, an aeronautical engineer and professor at Tokyo University, announced plans to have about 100 of their paper planes launched by a Japanese astronaut on board the international space station, 250 miles above Earth.

The 30cm planes, made from heat-resistant paper treated with silicon, survived temperatures of 250C and wind speeds of Mach 7 – seven times the speed of sound – during testing.

However, the attempt was postponed after the pair acknowledged it would be all but impossible to track them during their week-long journey to Earth, assuming any of them survived the searing descent.

Mr Toda, who received funding for the project from Jaxa, Japan's space agency, is determined not to give up, and hopes to get backing from China or Russia for another attempt.

Speaking earlier this year about the moment he became inspired to create an outer-space paper plane launched from a shuttle, he said: "Thirty years ago, I saw a space shuttle with a similar shape to a paper aeroplane, returning to Earth."

Mr Toda claims to have had made a paper plane with an almost identical triangular configuration three or four years before Nasa unveiled its shuttle.

"I thought it would be possible for a paper aircraft to do the same thing, but back then no-one would listen seriously to my ideas," he said.

However, before he attempts to conquer infinity and beyond, he may again try to achieve the origami plane equivalent of Roger Bannister's sub-four minute mile: keeping his plane aloft for a full half a minute. "I will get the 30-second record," he said. "It's just a matter of time."