Arturo’s Desert Eagle Flight a 6-Second Success for World’s Largest Paper Airplane
The gigantic paper airplane was pushed onto the runway at a private airstrip east of Eloy. Photo: Benjie Sanders/Arizona Daily Star
The Pima Air & Space Museum, which has been preserving the history of flight since 1976, decided to make some history of its own Wednesday by flying the largest paper airplane ever built.
It discovered how hard making history is.
Art Thompson, who designed the 45-foot-long, 800-pound paper plane, identified the possible weak point shortly after the plane was dollied into place on a private airstrip east of Eloy. “Our biggest problem is getting it off the ground,” Thompson said.
Indeed, when the “Great Paper Airplane Project” team did a test lift with a crane, the wings of “Arturo’s Desert Eagle” began to fold and the fuselage buckled.
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The goal of the project, in addition to generating publicity for the museum and its supporting foundation, was to “inspire kids to pursue careers in science and engineering.”
Arturo Valdenegro, whose much smaller airplane inspired the design of the big one, is already hooked.
Valdenegro, 12, a seventh-grader at Santa Cruz Catholic School, won the honor of working with Thompson on the plane’s design by beating out 150 other Tucson-area students in a paper-plane competition at the museum in January.
Valdenegro said his teacher, Jeremy Moreno, was teaching the class about aerodynamics when he mentioned the contest.
Valdenegro went home, looked it up on the Web and began folding sheets of paper into test models, perfecting the design until he could routinely fly his planes about 75 feet.
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After winning the flight contest in January, Valdenegro was flown to Los Angeles, where he consulted with Thompson, who formerly worked on the B-2 Stealth bomber for Northrop Grumman and for NASA and the U.S. Air Force, on the design of the bigger model.
Valdenegro’s goal in life was altered. “I want to be an engineer - kind of like what Art does,” he said.
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