With a bend of the knees and an arch of the back, a Japanese engineer today set a world flight record for a paper plane, keeping his hand-folded construction in the air for 26.1 seconds.

Using a plane specially designed for "long haul" flights, Takuo Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima earlier, but achieved with a plane that was held together with cellophane tape.

Today's flight, inside a Japan Airlines hangar near Haneda airport in Tokyo, was the longest by an unadulterated model. "I felt a lot of pressure," Toda told the Associated Press after his feat. "Everything is a factor ‑ the moisture in the air, the temperature, the crowd."

The record was all the more satisfying for having been achieved with a plane that stayed true to the traditions of origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. He folded his 10cm aircraft by hand from a single sheet of paper and did not use scissors or glue.

Toda, who is president of the Japan origami aeroplane association, said the secret to a successful launch was to avoid a flat trajectory and get the plane as high in the air as possible to give it time to circle slowly towards terra firma. "It's really a sport," he said. "The throwing technique is very delicate."

Toda has established himself as the world's foremost folder of paper planes, an obsession that now has him setting his sights on the final frontier. Last year he and fellow enthusiast Shinji Suzuki, an aeronautical engineer and professor at Tokyo University, announced plans to have about 100 of their paper planes launched by a Japanese astronaut on board the international space station, 250 miles above Earth.

The 30cm planes, made from heat-resistant paper treated with silicon, survived temperatures of 250C and wind speeds of mach 7 ‑ seven times the speed of sound ‑ during testing. But the attempt was postponed after the pair acknowledged it would be all but impossible to track them during their week-long journey to Earth, assuming any of them survived the searing descent.

Toda, who received funding for the project from Jaxa, Japan's space agency, is determined not to give up and hopes to get backing from China or Russia for another attempt. Before then, he may again try to achieve the origami plane equivalent of Roger Bannister's sub-four-minute mile: keeping his plane aloft for a full half a minute.

"I will get the 30-second record," he said. "It's just a matter of time."