With the fighting stalemated in the trenches, all the great powers in aviation-Russia, Italy, Germany, Britain, and even, belatedly, the United States-bankrolled this frenetic arms race, commissioning design after design for exotic strategic bombers and long-range marine patrol craft. The giants had four or more engines and crews that included in-flight mechanics, radio operators, and defensive gunners. Indeed, the R.VI was larger than any Luftwaffe aircraft used against Britain in the Second World War. The Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI German heavy bomber that terrorized London in 1918 had a wingspan of 138 feet, 34 feet longer than a 1942 Boeing B-17. The World War I giants came in all shapes but always in great size. His journal recalls only that he took charge of the salvage operation upon his arrival.Ĭaproni’s triple triplane was one of a startling and all but forgotten class of giant airplanes that arose in the technological hothouse of aircraft design in the years surrounding the First World War. Caproni was, by all accounts, not a sentimental man, and by this point in his career, he was well acquainted with crashes. By the time Gianni Caproni arrived at the lake, the pilot had been rescued, but attempts to pull the wreckage to shore worsened the damage. “It certainly comes out of the water, but I think it was something like the flight of the Spruce Goose,” said Alegi, referencing Howard Hughes and the brief first-and-last flight, in 1947, of his giant seaplane, the H-4 Hercules. Did a lake boat suddenly swerve into the path of his taxi run? Did Semprini misjudge his speed? Or did Semprini just feel ready to fly? It’s impossible to say what exactly caused Semprini to take off while his boss was still miles away. For nearly a month, pilot Federico Semprini had been conducting taxi tests on the lake to balance the hydroplane. Which led me to ask: Did this thing actually fly? Alegi clarified Caproni wasn’t at Lake Maggiore on the morning of March 4 but still in transit from the Malpensa factory. Add the three towers of linen wings, and it looked a lot more like a square-rigger under full sail. Its rounded nose, integral flight deck, and streamlined seaplane hull made the Ca.60 fuselage look something like a modern wide-body jet. Panoramic windows ran along both sides of the long cabin so that passengers, sitting in two wide rows, would have unrestricted views of the world below. It had eight engines, all serviceable by mechanics in flight. The Ca.60 had nine wings arranged in three sets of three. (The “Ca” is pronounced “caw.”) The airplane was also known as the “Transaereo” for Caproni’s wildly ambitious mission: to carry 100 passengers in comfort and style across the Atlantic Ocean. The Volandia fragments are displayed with blueprints, photos, and a large-scale model, allowing Alegi to illuminate the short career of the Noviplano, which he calls the Ca.60. All had been fished from Lake Maggiore, sadly the only body of water the gigantic seaplane ever launched from or landed in-hard. As billed, the Noviplano relics were sparse-a fuselage bracket here, a wing strut brace there. Now a museum park, Volandia still has the funeral chapel Caproni built during the Great War for unlucky student pilots. Alegi led me to the Noviplano relic display on the far side of the industrial campus of historic workshops and hangars that had grown up around Caproni’s original 1910 shack. I was ushered inside to meet Gregory Alegi, a Yale-educated Italian journalist, defense analyst, and aviation historian. Next I took the train to the Volandia Museum of Flight, just outside the perimeter fence of Milan’s Malpensa international airport. I’d trekked up into the Italian Alps to the Caproni museum in Trento only to learn that a small section of the hull and other pieces from the wreck of the Noviplano were in storage, awaiting conservation. I had been warned that there wasn’t much left of the airplane that designer Gianni Caproni had intended to be a transatlantic flying boat-the Noviplano-which had crashed and broken apart concluding its first and final flight, on March 4, 1921.
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