Hundreds of Tucson area school children will get a chance to let their lessons take flight and their imaginations soar over the next month as they participate in the Great Paper Airplane Project through an innovative competition developed by BBDO San Francisco for the the Pima Air & Space Museum.

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.

The inspirational science project to promote the museum is part of a greater campaign to interest kids in aviation and engineering. Yvonne C. Morris, Executive Director of the Arizona Aerospace Foundation and Pima Air & Space Museum said “Museums today are not just repositories of our past, they must inspire the future. Having kids help us create aviation history is what this project is all about.”

At the end of a month of paper airplane construction and practice sessions, the first 300 children between the ages of 6 and 14 who sign up on the www.GreatPaperAirplane.org website will be eligible to compete to see whose paper airplane can fly the furthest. The competition begins at 11 a.m., Saturday, January 14, 2012, at the Pima Air and Space Museum, 6000 E. Valencia Rd.

The young paper airplane flier whose plane flies the furthest will win a spot as Guest Engineer on the team challenging the Guinness Book of World Record’s largest paper airplane honors. This massive paper airplane – with the young Guest Engineer’s name on the tail or nose — will eventually soar from a height of 5,000 feet over the Arizona desert.  It may fly for miles or crash and burn, but that’s all part of the fun of scientific experimentation.

“We know that an early interest in science can lead to a lifetime of discovery, Morris said. “We want to help inspire the next great scientific minds in our country and this contest will be a fun way to engage students and get them thinking about the science of flight.”

UPDATED – March 21st, 2012

It flew!