Paper airplanes are wonderful. Few things made a boring middle school math class go by like crafting the perfect paper bird and hurling it at the head of your best buddy across the room. I always found there was one problem with paper airplanes: they’re just two damn small. Well, it seems someone else thought the same thing I did and decided to make what they claim is the world’s biggest paper airplane, and we thank them for their service.
YouTuber Ross Smith, whose channel seems like a real nightmare, did one good thing and decided to, as he screams at the beginning of the 47-second video, “throw the world’s biggest paper airplane off of this cliff.” Now, I don’t know if this is actually the world’s biggest paper airplane. It doesn’t seem official or anything, but I am inclined to believe anything that is yelled at me.
Anyway, 10 seconds into the video, the majestic beast — which seems to be made up of a bunch of different pieces of paper, and not just one big sheet as my child-like brain imagined — takes off toward the sky, floating majestically down the, well, cliff. She stays airborne before succumbing to gravity returning to the earth below 19 seconds after takeoff, crash landing onto the grassy knoll below.
After those glorious 19 seconds, which is 7 seconds longer than those bum Wright Brothers could manage, the paper plane travelled 440 feet — according to the video. Again, I cannot confirm this actually happened, since it’s an edited video, but I want to believe, so I will.