March 25, 2012 - A 45-foot paper airplane with a 24-foot wingspan, quite possibly the largest ever constructed, was launched yesterday outside of Tucson by the Pima Air & Space Museum, one of the largest aviation museums in the world.  

Aeronautical engineers designed the plane, inspired by 12-year-old Tucson resident Arturo Valdenegro, whose paper airplane flew the farthest when he competed against hundreds of children in a regional paper airplane distance contest held at the museum in January.  

As winner of the contest, Valdenegro got to meet with the engineers who oversaw the design and build of the 800-pound paper airplane, which defied gravity yesterday at an altitude of 2,703 feet and speed of 98 miles per hour.  

"The arresting visual of the paper airplane in flight rekindled the childhood creativity in all of us," explains Yvonne Morris, Executive Director of the Pima Air & Space Museum and Arizona Aerospace Foundation.

The public can view the larger-than-life paper airplane in person when it goes on display at the Pima Air & Space Museum later this spring. The museum, which is non-government funded, maintains a collection of more than 300 aircraft and spacecraft from around the globe, including many rare and one-of-a-kind artifacts.

The Pima Air & Space Museum is one of the largest aviation Museums in the world, and the largest non-government funded aviation Museum in the United States. The Museum, which opened in 1976, maintains a collection of more than 300 aircraft and spacecraft from around the globe, including many rare and one-of-a-kind, and more than 125,000 artifacts.  

Exhibits at the Museum include some of the world's greatest aviation heritage, including military, commercial, and civil aviation. Among them are a B-29 Superfortress, the SR-71 Blackbird, and a rare World War II German V-1 "buzz bomb." The Museum has five large hangars totaling more than 177,000 indoor feet of exhibit space.