Man Spent 10 Years And 10,000 Hours Building An Incredibly Detailed Boeing Paper Airplane

Building an airplane is no easy feat, but one man spent 10 years and 10,000 hours painstakingly crafting a 1:60 scale model of Boeing’s 777-300ER using nothing but manila folders and glue in what may be the longest wait time ever for a Boeing machine. The paper airplane game has just met its match.

The Dirtiest Things On An Airplane

Luca Iaconi-Stewart first kicked off his Air India replica passion in 2008,  Simple Flying reports, after which point he decided to launch into designing and building something complex. His inspiration was Boeing’s 777-300ER decked out in an Air India livery, and instead of just making a model that looks cool, he decided to make it functional, too: the model features moving parts and even a paper version of the plane’s General Electric GE90-115B engine.

And Iaconi-Stewart also isn’t crafting his planes out of hard-to-source materials or utilizing technology unavailable to the larger public. Nope; he’s making his designs on Adobe, then bringing them to life with a small kit of tools consisting of nothing but manila folders, Tacky Glue, and an Xacto knife. Basically, he just picked materials that he could easily access, and voila. A legend was born, one finicky detail at a time.

You can check out a time lapse of Iaconi-Stewart painting his Air India replica below:

PAINT SHOP // Painting Time-lapse // Air India Manila Folder 777-300ER

Talent like this is rare, and it has come with some tumultuous happenings. Iaconi-Stewart first got started on his Boeing project when he was in college and found that he needed to postpone his studies to be able to give his paper airplane more attention, something I am sure went down well at the family dinner table. However, he’s also partnered with companies like Singapore Airlines to build paper versions of the Airbus A380.