Free Republic

With a bend of the knees and an arch of the back, a Japanese engineer today set a world flight record for a paper plane, keeping his hand-folded construction in the air for 26.1 seconds. Using a plane specially designed for "long haul" flights, Takuo Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima earlier, but achieved with a plane that was held together with cellophane tape. Today's flight, inside a Japan Airlines hangar near Haneda airport in Tokyo, was the longest by an unadulterated model. "I felt a lot of...

February 7, 2008 Japan to launch origami planes into outer space Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent Video: how to create the perfct paper plane In a bold bid to take the traditional art of origami beyond the Final Frontier, Japan is planning to release a huge squadron of paper aeroplanes in outer space. The trailblazing experiment, slated for launch later this year, could see around 100 paper planes raining down on the planet as they are captured by the Earth’s gravitational pull and sucked down towards the surface. Astronomers and star-gazers should have plenty of warning of the planes’ arrival,...