Fiat meets Aerfer in Naples

Aeritalia was founded in Naples on 12 November 1969 by merging the aviation division of Fiat with Aerfer, the Neapolitan state-owned aircraft firm, together with Salmoiraghi. It was meant to give Italy one large aerospace company instead of several small ones. The state, through IRI’s Finmeccanica, took full control in 1976, and the headquarters settled in Turin, where Fiat’s aircraft men had built fighters since the 1920s.

A V/STOL transport that lost its lift jets

Its first big inheritance was a Fiat design. In answer to a NATO requirement for a vertical take-off transport, Giuseppe Gabrielli’s team had drawn the G.222 with extra lift engines. The Italian Air Force, looking to replace its C-119 Flying Boxcars, liked the idea but not the complexity, and the lift jets were dropped in favour of two General Electric T64 turboprops. The G.222 first flew on 18 July 1970 and kept a remarkable short-field performance. 111 were built for customers from Argentina to Nigeria, Venezuela and Thailand, with final assembly moved from Turin to Naples in 1978.

Starfighters for the Aeronautica

In the meantime the Turin lines kept busy with fast jets. Aeritalia continued Fiat’s G.91 light fighter family, building 65 production G.91Y twin-engine versions for the Aeronautica Militare, and made 246 F-104S Starfighters between 1966 and 1979, an Italian development of the Lockheed design that carried Sparrow missiles and stayed in Italian service until October 2004. The G.91Y had first flown on 27 December 1966 and was retired in 1994.

Tornado, AMX and a turboprop with France

The future, though, was international. Aeritalia took a share of the Panavia Tornado with Britain and Germany, partnered Boeing on the 767 from the start, and in 1978 joined Aermacchi on a light strike jet; Embraer came in later, and the AMX flew on 15 May 1984, with Aeritalia building 46.5 per cent of each aircraft. On 4 November 1981 its chairman Renato Bonifacio and Aérospatiale’s Jacques Mitterrand signed the deal that created ATR. The ATR 42 flew in August 1984 and the ATR family is still in production.

Into Alenia, and an afterlife as scrap

In 1990 Finmeccanica merged Aeritalia with the electronics firm Selenia to form Alenia, today part of Leonardo. The G.222 lived on as the C-27J Spartan. Its earlier version had an inglorious end: 16 refurbished G.222s bought for the Afghan Air Force under a programme costing about $486 million were grounded and, in 2014, scrapped at Kabul for about $32,000, roughly six cents a pound. G.222 production itself ran until 1993.

Factories

• Turin works · Turin, Piedmont — Headquarters and ex-Fiat fighter lines
• Naples works · Naples, Campania — Ex-Aerfer; G.222 fuselage and final assembly from 1978

People

• Giuseppe Gabrielli · chief designer — Led the G.222 design; the G stands for his name
• Renato Bonifacio · chairman — Signed the ATR cooperation agreement, 1981