The return is the biggest paper airplane competition. The idea of ​​Red Bull Paper Wings is simple and clever: No fuel. No engine. Competitors have only one A4 page to fly through the air: the farthest, the longest time, or the most artistic way possible. The national winners of these three categories (flight time, air distance and acrobatics) will be invited to the Austrian Red Bull Paper Wings World Final, where they will be named the 2022 champions.

In Spain, a total of 20 universities will take part in the preliminary rounds, and their respective representatives will be chosen for the national finals. Paper pilots will be able to compete in two pre-flight categories: flight distance and air time. The third is made entirely on the Tik Tok digital platform, which is already open to students from all over Spain.

Categories

• Distance: To be successful, pilots must be able to fly their paper airplanes farther away from other opponents. In the final final of 2019, American Jake Hardy achieved 56.61 meters.
• Flight time: Pilots must fold paper airplanes with sufficient aerodynamics to stay in the air for the longest time. In 2019, Australian Cameron Clark won in 13.33 seconds.
• Acrobatics: This category is about wonderful acrobatic tricks. In the 2019 final, Ukrainian Kateryna Ahafonova achieved a perfect 10 with her performance. Drivers are not required to report university qualifiers to face-to-face classifications. Instead, they can show off their creativity at home with paper airplanes and share their skills at Tik Tok. The rider with the most votes from the national jury will reach the Global Final.
• Qualifying stops in Spain are taking place in March in various national institutions.

The art of making paper airplanes

Making paper airplanes is a thousand-year-old art. As we await the Red Bull Paper Wings World Final, we celebrate hand-made aerodynamics.

Commercial aviation technology is so advanced that airline passengers often post stories on social media overcoming the monotony of being patiently sitting in relative silence for an hour. Once the flight safety video is complete, it’s easy to ignore the obvious intersection between physics and engineering that occurs while the aircraft takes off.

Red Bull Paper Wings

Red Bull Paper Wings, the largest international paper airplane competition and the official paper airplane world championship, is a celebration of students from all over the world, a celebration that maintains the old tradition of looking at the sky and wondering how things work.

The premise is simple: take a standard A4 office paper, fold it, without tearing it, to create a flying machine, and take part in the competition you want: Distance, Flight Time or Acrobatics. The first two categories are fairly straightforward, with participants aiming to break existing world records. Acrobatics is a creative category that involves performing sensational tricks.

The first Red Bull Paper Wings was held in 2006 and its popularity has steadily grown with competitions in 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2019. In 2022, regional distance and flight time eliminations will take place in many countries around the world. Meanwhile, in the Acrobatics category, potential competitors are getting creative with paper airplanes and enhancing their mastery by sending digital videos. The national finalists in all three categories will be invited to Salzburg (Austria) to compete in the world final in the iconic Hangar-7.

If you want to get a PhD in paper airplanes, take a look at John M Collins, the man who literally wrote a book on the construction of paper airplanes: 'The World Record Paper Airplane and International Award Winning Designs'. Collins holds the world record for the longest distance a paper airplane can fly and attributes its success to aeronautical engineering to its fascination with the ancient art of origami.

More information:
www.paperwings.redbull.com