How far can a paper plane fly?

The farthest a paper plane has ever flown is 98.43 metres, thrown indoors in Shanghai on 28 December 2025 by a Chinese student called Liu Liwen. That's one sheet of A4, weighing about 6 g, flying very nearly the length of a football pitch.

For most of its life, the record hardly moved. Then three teams in three and a half years added more distance to it than the previous 37 years had managed, and the 100-metre mark is now 1.57 metres away.

What counts as a paper plane

Guinness World Records keeps the rules short. The plane is folded from a single sheet of paper no bigger than A4 and no heavier than 100 gsm, and it's thrown indoors, so the wind can't help. A small piece of tape is allowed, according to the paper plane site Fold 'N Fly, but no glue, and no cuts or tears.

Because the paper is fixed, we can work out exactly what's being thrown. A0 is one square metre, and A4 is a sixteenth of it: 210 × 297 mm, or 0.0624 square metres. At 100 gsm, the heaviest the rules allow, that comes to 6.2 g. The weight is there on purpose, because the Boeing engineers who broke the record in 2022 chose the heaviest paper allowed, saying a heavier plane carries more momentum once it leaves the hand.

Forty years of throwing

Guinness first recorded the distance in 1985, at 58.82 metres, and it crept up slowly from there. In 2003 Stephen Kreiger reached 63.19 metres, and that stood until February 2012, when Joe Ayoob, a former quarterback for the University of California, threw a plane called Suzanne 69.14 metres down a hangar at McClellan Air Force Base, near Sacramento. Suzanne was designed by John Collins, a television producer who calls himself the Paper Airplane Guy, and the two of them spent a year on the plane and the throw. They did it with less help than Kreiger had, too, because the run-up allowed had been cut from 30 feet to 10.

Their record lasted ten years, and then it started moving quickly. In May 2022 Kim Kyu Tae, in South Korea, threw 77.134 metres. That December, three Boeing engineers, Dillon Ruble, Garrett Jensen and Nathan Erickson, pushed it to 88.31 metres in Crown Point, Indiana, with a design they called Mach 5, inspired by hypersonic aircraft. It took them hundreds of hours, and simulations told them to launch it at 40 degrees.

Liu Liwen beat them by just over 10 metres, with five classmates helping, and he got there on his ninth throw after eight that didn't count. Laid end to end along their long edges, it would take 331 sheets of A4 to cover the distance his one sheet flew.

Put the dates side by side and the change is plain. From 1985 to May 2022, the record grew by 18.3 metres. From May 2022 to December 2025, it grew by 21.3. The paper and the rules haven't changed, so the difference is the people throwing it: the last two records went first to a team of Boeing engineers, then to a team of students.

The longest time in the air

Distance isn't the only record, and the other one moves even more slowly. Takuo Toda, from Japan, kept a paper plane in the air for 29.2 seconds in Fukuyama, Hiroshima, on 19 December 2010, and nobody beat him for more than 15 years. On 11 February 2026 a team of seven in Kunshan, Jiangsu, managed 31.2 seconds, so two seconds took fifteen years.

The rules for this one ask for unmodified A4 "or equivalent", which leaves the door open for an American attempt on US Letter. Side by side with A4, Letter is 5.9 mm wider and 17.6 mm shorter, and about 3% smaller overall, so it's slightly lighter at the same gsm.

The biggest paper plane

The record for size can't use one sheet of A4, so it has rules of its own. The current holder is ICARUS, built by students at the University of Pisa out of nothing but paper and glue. It's 7 metres long, and its wings span 20.04 metres, about the length of 67 sheets of A4 laid end to end. To count, it had to be launched by one person from a platform no higher than 3 metres, and fly at least 15.

Guinness certified it on 25 June 2026 at the WMF We Make Future fair in Bologna, taking the title from a 2013 plane built at the Braunschweig Institute of Technology, in Germany, which had an 18.21-metre wingspan. ICARUS flew 59 metres, which is a long way for something with a 20-metre wingspan, and 39 metres short of a single sheet of A4.