An Air India Boeing 777 Replica Made Entirely Out of Manila Folders

Luca Iaconi-Stewart builds a 1:60 model of an Air India Boeing 777-300ER entirely out of manila folders. The work is incredible well done and the details are absolutely amazing.

He’s now spent more than 10,000 hours building an exact model replica — at 1/60th scale — of a Boeing 777-300ER plane entirely out of cut-out manila folder parts. He’s not even done.

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Iaconi-Stewart began work on the model while attending Lick-Wilmerding High School, a private school in San Francisco.

He made models of skyscrapers, but it was the Boeing plane that drew him.

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And so as he was finishing his junior year, in 2008, he began finding photos on the Internet, and the dimensions of the 777 from the Boeing website.

Air India had posted an extremely detailed schematic of the seat arrangements, and Iaconi-Stewart managed to get hold of a training manual for the plane.

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Then, using Adobe Illustrator, he drew out everything.

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There were 303 economy seats, 35 business-class seats, and 4 first-class seats that had to be made.

One first-class seat took 6 to 8 hours to make. Iaconi-Stewart got the making of the economy seats down to 1 hour each.

Some of the parts he had to make were literally the size of a pinhead.

“It’s hard to keep up that level of focus day in and day out,” he says. “When you have to create everything from scratch it can be very draining.

“There were times I absolutely hated it. But then I could see the end in finishing the project. But then you get a certain amount of satisfaction in reverse engineering something and making it out of unconventional material.”