The Pima Air & Space Museum needed to get more young people to visit the museum and be inspired by engineering and aviation. So we decided to do something big, and childish. We built and flew a giant 45’ paper aeroplane. The plane was loosely based on the design of a twelve year-old boy, the winner of a paper aeroplane contest we had arranged for hundreds of kids. He then consulted with engineers as the giant paper aeroplane was constructed, named the plane, attended a test flight, and was present for the historic flight of The Great Paper Airplane.

Within 3 weeks of launching our historic 45' plane, we were able to achieve over 123m media impressions, including 225 unique news outlets and our story was picked up in 9 different countries.

In 1 month we garnered 53,310 unique website visitors – the site has consistently averaged at 1,500 unique visitors – and the teaser video got over 861,000 views.Our real success was felt when we were picked up by a children's blog called DOGO news. Kids continue to read and leave comments such as "I wish I could make one. I mean that is just so super cool!" – rnstata.

This idea was crazy. It'd never been done. And to pull something like this off on a museum's pro-bono budget based on donations, we needed to be crafty. So we enlisted the help of world renowned engineers and a paper aeroplane-throwing world champion to help us. Everyone we approached about the project wanted to help because it brought out the kid in them! After months of planning, building and testing, we took our 45’ plane into the air, filmed it, and it flew. When we started putting the footage up on the web, the public took notice.

We wanted to reinforce the museum’s hands’ on aviation approach. Because we couldn’t take up every child in a B-29, we did the next best thing – host a paper aeroplane competition in the main hangar of the museum. But in order to capture the attention of parents and their children who might not already be interested in aviation, we needed to do something bigger to get the museum on the map. That’s when we decided that the winner of the paper aeroplane competition would get to help build a 45’ giant paper aeroplane loosely based on their winning design.