The trainer that founded a Pilatus dynasty

What makes the Pilatus P-2 special

Pilatus P-2 full specifications

Baseline: the Pilatus P-2-06 as delivered to the Swiss Fliegertruppe between December 1949 and September 1950 — the armed advanced and gunnery trainer, Argus As 410A-2 inverted V-12, retractable tailwheel undercarriage, one synchronised machine gun above the engine and two underwing racks — because that is the mark that gave the type its working purpose and the mark that most of today's surviving warbirds actually are. Deltas for the P-2-01 prototype of 1945, the unarmed P-2-05 of 1946–48 and the water-cooled P-2-03/P-2-04 proposals are in grey. Four corrections before the figures. First, the production total and the split. The number repeated almost everywhere is 55 or 56 built, 26 P-2-05 and 26 P-2-06. The Swiss serial blocks will not support it. The unarmed batch ran U-102 to U-128, which is twenty-seven airframes, and the armed batch U-132 to U-157, which is twenty-six — fifty-three production aircraft. Add the P-2-01 prototype, U-101, and the air force took fifty-four flyable machines; the P-2-02 was a static test frame that never flew. The English-language reference works contradict themselves on this: the same article that lists 26 and 26 in its variant table says in its body text that the second batch was twenty-five. The defensible statement is 53 production aircraft in two batches, one flying prototype, one static airframe, one customer, and anyone quoting a tidy 26 plus 26 is quoting a table rather than a delivery record. Second, the construction. The P-2 is routinely called all-metal and it is not. It is a mixed-construction aeroplane — light alloy, steel, wood and fabric — and the economies went further than that: to keep the price down and the supply chain inside Switzerland, Pilatus reused parts already in the Fliegertruppe's stores, most famously the main undercarriage legs and wheels of the Messerschmitt Bf 109E. A Swiss trainer of 1945 therefore stood on German fighter landing gear and was pulled along by a German bomber-trainer engine. Third, the never-exceed speed. The figure of 720 km/h (447 mph) appears in the standard specification tables. It is not credible for a 340 km/h trainer with a framed sliding canopy and a wooden-structure wing, and it is almost certainly a transposition of 420 km/h. It is reproduced below because it is what the sources say, flagged because it should not be believed. Fourth, the engines. There was never a Swiss production line for the Argus. Every As 410 the P-2 fleet ever used came from a batch bought from Germany during the war, and after May 1945 no more were made anywhere. The type flew for thirty-five years on a closed stock of engines, which is the single most important fact about its service life and the reason the warbird fleet flies as sparingly as it does today.

Armament & payload

Half the Pilatus P-2 fleet carried one machine gun and a few practice bombs, and that was the entire point of it

The P-2 was never a combat aeroplane and Switzerland never pretended otherwise, so the six headings below are repurposed to describe what a gunnery trainer actually carried rather than padded with six empty cards. Twenty-six aircraft of the second batch, the P-2-06, were built as Schiessflugzeuge: one fixed machine gun above the engine firing through the propeller disc, and two underwing racks each taking three practice or fragmentation bombs, with provision for light rockets. The other twenty-seven, the P-2-05, carried nothing but a radio, an oxygen system and a blind-flying hood. That division of labour is the interesting part of the design. Switzerland did not want an armed trainer because it expected the trainer to fight; it wanted a machine on which a pupil could learn to point an aeroplane at a ground target, fire live rounds on the Axalp and Forel ranges, and be assessed doing it, before he was let near a Morane D-3801 or, later, a Vampire. Mark and fit varied. Sources rarely name the gun; Swiss aircraft of the period carried the 7.5 mm Flieger-Maschinengewehr 29, and that is the strong presumption for the P-2-06, but the calibre is better attested than the exact designation. Rocket provision is documented but was used far less than the bomb racks, and some accounts of P-2 armament describe post-1981 civil or film modifications rather than anything the Fliegertruppe ever fitted.

Sourcing caveat: the P-2's armament is thinly documented in English and only slightly better in German. The gun's calibre, the two three-bomb racks and the existence of rocket provision are consistent across sources; the gun's exact designation, ammunition natures, sight type and rocket type are not, and no manual-level source was available for this entry. Where this section names the Flieger-Mg 29 it is drawing an inference from standard Swiss practice, and says so.

Variants

Six designations, two of which flew in numbers, and a line of descent that runs straight to the PC-7

The P-2 exists because Switzerland decided, as a matter of doctrine rather than industrial vanity, that a neutral country cannot depend on foreign factories for the aeroplanes it trains its pilots on. Between the wars the Confederation built the Morane-Saulnier MS.406 under licence as the D-3800 and D-3801 at the federal works at Thun and at Altenrhein, built the EKW C-3603 outright, and bought Bf 109s from Germany while it could. Pilatus Flugzeugwerke was founded at Stans on 16 December 1939 into exactly that policy — backed by Emil Bührle of Werkzeugmaschinenfabrik Oerlikon with the Elektrobank, sited deliberately in the interior of the country beside Buochs airfield and far from any frontier, and set to work first on maintenance and on assembling C-35s from spares.

Pilatus wanted to build a trainer and tried twice to buy a licence — for the German Arado Ar 96 and, on the procurement authority's side, for an Italian design. Both attempts failed, and the failure is the best thing that ever happened to the company: told it could not build somebody else's aeroplane, it designed its own. The preliminary study, openly indebted to the Arado, went to the air force in 1942; construction of the prototype began late in 1943; the first flight was on 27 April 1945, three weeks before the war in Europe ended. Fifty-three production aircraft followed, and Pilatus — a firm with no aeroplane of its own to its name in 1942 — had a product.

What followed matters more than the P-2 itself. The P-3 of 1953 is a P-2 rethought for the jet age: tricycle undercarriage, side-by-side ideas rejected in favour of the same tandem seating, a flat-six Lycoming in place of the German V-12. The PC-7 of 1966 and 1975 is a P-3 with a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A turboprop where the Lycoming was. From that came the PC-9 and the PC-21, and from the money they earned came the PC-6, the PC-12 and everything Pilatus is today. The line from a wartime trainer built around scavenged Messerschmitt landing gear to the aeroplane that trains a large fraction of the world's military pilots is unbroken and traceable aircraft by aircraft.

P-2-01 (1943–45, 1 built)

The prototype. Argus As 410A-2, unarmed, flown 27 April 1945; carried the civil marks HB-GAB and the military serials A-101 and U-101 at different points in its life. Preserved by Pilatus at Stans.

P-2-02 (1944, 1 built, never flew)

Static test airframe for structural proof loading. It is a real airframe and is why some totals say 55 or 56 where delivery records say 54.

P-2-03 (project / prototype, water-cooled)

Alternative powerplant study around the Hispano-Suiza 12Mb, an upright water-cooled V-12, with a large ventral radiator that transformed the aeroplane's appearance. Pursued as insurance against the German engine supply, abandoned once the Argus stock proved sufficient.

P-2-04 (project, water-cooled and armed)

Armed derivative of the P-2-03: the gunnery-trainer requirement married to the Hispano-Suiza installation. Not proceeded with; the armament requirement went instead to the Argus-engined P-2-06.

P-2-05 (1946–48, 27 built, U-102 to U-128)

The unarmed advanced trainer and the first Pilatus aeroplane in series production. Radio, oxygen, blind-flying hood, night-flying equipment, no weapons. Ordered after the 1946 trials and the aircraft on which Swiss pilots learned instrument flying for a generation.

P-2-06 (December 1949 to September 1950, 26 built, U-132 to U-157)

The armament trainer: one synchronised 7.5 mm machine gun above the engine and two underwing racks for three light bombs each, with rocket provision. Externally near-identical to the P-2-05 apart from the gun trough and the racks.

Civil conversions (from 1981, ~48 airframes)

Not a factory variant but the largest single population. On withdrawal the fleet was sold complete into private hands and re-registered in Switzerland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Most changes are paperwork and paint; a few aircraft have had the armament removed or replaced with dummies.

Film aircraft (1980s onward, a handful)

Several civil P-2s have been dressed as German fighters — spinner, cross, splinter camouflage, sometimes a dummy cannon — and used as generic Luftwaffe types on screen and at airshows. The best known appearance is in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). No P-2 is a Messerschmitt of any kind and none has ever been converted into a flying replica of one; the resemblance is entirely a matter of the inverted-V nose and the paint.

Survivors, honestly. Roughly forty-eight airframes were still on charge when the Fliegertruppe retired the type in 1981 and were sold as a fleet into private ownership — an unusually clean disposal that is the reason so many exist today. By 2008 at least twenty-three were carried on the civil registers of Switzerland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the prototype U-101 is preserved at Pilatus in Stans. Every one of these is an original Pilatus-built airframe: no P-2 replica or reproduction has ever been constructed, and the type has no kit, homebuilt or scaled derivative. What cannot be stated honestly is how many fly in any given year. There is no audited airworthiness census, register entries lag reality by years in both directions, and the binding constraint is not the airframe but the Argus As 410 — an engine out of production since 1945, with a reputation for connecting-rod and piston failure, and no source of new parts. The realistic picture is a few dozen surviving airframes, a smaller number currently airworthy, and a still smaller number flown regularly. Any figure quoted more precisely than that is a guess wearing a number.

Operators

The Pilatus P-2 was built for one customer, the Swiss Air Force, and flew for it for 35 years.

Pilatus’s first production aircraft borrowed its undercarriage from the Bf 109 and its engine from Germany, and every one of the 53-odd examples went to the Swiss Fliegertruppe as an advanced and weapons trainer between 1946 and 1981. No foreign air force ever bought it; its second life came on the civil warbird circuit, where it doubles for Luftwaffe fighters in films. Production is quoted as 52, 53 or 54 depending on whether prototypes are counted; a claimed Haitian Air Force example is unsourced and omitted.

1 operators, 0 current. Quantities are airframes taken on charge; dates are first delivery to last retirement. Air forces with a MiGFlug Order of Battle page are linked (1 so far); the rest follow as the database grows.

From wartime trainer to flying warbird

Twelve stories from the Pilatus P-2

The Pilatus P-2 in pictures

‹›

The Pilatus P-2 in motion

Pilatus P-2 — the Messerschmitt Bf-109 Trainer. Airshow footage of an airworthy P-2 flying and showing off the deep note of its air-cooled Argus V12 — the aircraft that once prepared Swiss pilots for the Bf 109.

Where the Pilatus P-2 flew

A trainer, not a fighter

The Pilatus P-2 never flew in combat — that was never its purpose. Its record is written in the thousands of Swiss pilots it prepared for front-line fighters over three and a half decades, and in the rare distinction of still being flyable today. These are the numbers that define it.

Explore the rest of the Book of Beasts aircraft encyclopedia for the fighters the P-2’s graduates went on to fly.

Everything people ask about the Pilatus P-2

Continue the tour

Every fact, checked

• Pilatus AircraftCompany history and the trainer lineage from the P-2 through the P-3 to the PC-7 family.
• Swiss Armed Forces / Swiss Air ForceReference for Swiss Air Force trainer operation and the 1946–1981 service period.
• Swiss aviation heritage collectionsBackground on preserved and airworthy Swiss warbirds including the P-2.
• GoAviator — Pilatus P-2 flight experience, GrenchenDetails of the public P-2 warbird flight: duration, price and sightseeing or aerobatic options.
• flugzeuginfo.netCross-checked dimensions, weights and performance figures for the P-2.
• Wikimedia Commons — Pilatus P-2Image source and licensing for the photographs used on this page.
• MiGFlug Book of BeastsThe wider aircraft encyclopedia, including the fighters P-2 graduates went on to fly.