A crash at Pisa

On 7 August 1941 a big four-engined bomber came in too low near Pisa and hit a house. At the controls was Bruno Mussolini, the dictator’s son, commanding the squadron trialling Italy’s new secret weapon, the Piaggio P.108. He was killed. The P.108 was the only four-engined bomber the Regia Aeronautica used in the Second World War, and it was built by a company that had started out fitting out ocean liners and building railway carriages, and would soon become famous for something much smaller.

Ships, trains and seaplanes

Rinaldo Piaggio founded his firm at Sestri Ponente, Genoa, in 1884. Railway rolling stock and ship interiors paid for a big new factory at Finale Ligure in 1906, and in 1915 Piaggio bought the Officine Aeronautiche Francesco Oneto and moved into aviation. From 1924 it built Jupiter engines and Dornier Wal flying boats under licence. Engineers Giovanni Pegna and Giuseppe Gabrielli joined, a wind tunnel followed in 1928, and Piaggio aircraft won about twenty records in the 1920s and 1930s. Rinaldo died in 1938, the year the P.108 was completed.

The engineer who hated motorbikes

Among Piaggio’s engineers was Corradino D’Ascanio, whose coaxial D’AT3 of 1930 was one of the first practical helicopters. When the war ended with Piaggio’s Pontedera bomber plant bombed flat, Rinaldo’s son Enrico asked him for a cheap scooter. D’Ascanio hated motorcycles, which he thought bulky, dirty and unreliable, so he designed something else: a pressed-steel body, a shielded rider and an engine beside the rear wheel. Seeing the prototype, Enrico exclaimed, Sembra una vespa! It looks like a wasp. The Vespa was born in 1946, and a million had been sold by 1956.

One house becomes two

Aircraft did not stop. The P.136 amphibian flew in 1948, sold in America as the Royal Gull; West Germany ordered 265 P.149 trainers in 1953; the P.166 utility aircraft followed in 1957. Piaggio licence-built the Rolls-Royce Viper jet engine from 1960, and with Douglas created the PD.808, which first flew at Genoa on 29 August 1964, the only Italian twin-jet certified as a transport aircraft. In 1964 the family split the business: Enrico kept the Vespa at Pontedera, while Armando, and later the founder’s grandson Rinaldo, kept the aircraft at Sestri Ponente.

The Avanti

The aviation house’s masterpiece flew on 23 September 1986. The P.180 Avanti put its two PT6 turboprops behind the wing as pushers, added a small foreplane, and used a fuselage developed early on with Gates Learjet. The FAI lists it as the fastest propeller-driven aircraft of its kind. It was certified in Italy and the United States in 1990. Yet the 1990s brought bankruptcy, and in 1998 investors led by Piero Ferrari, vice-chairman of Ferrari, and José Di Mase rescued the company as Piaggio Aero Industries. A 36-aircraft Avanti II order from Avantair in 2005 put it back on its feet.

From Abu Dhabi to Ankara

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala bought in from 2006, with India’s Tata alongside, and took full control in 2015. It renamed the firm Piaggio Aerospace in 2014, opened a new plant at Villanova d’Albenga and bet on a military drone, the P.1HH HammerHead. When a 766 million euro Italian drone order failed to appear, Mubadala asked for state administration, granted on 3 December 2018. Avanti deliveries had fallen from 30 in 2008 to four a year. Six years later, on 27 December 2024, Baykar, maker of the Bayraktar TB2, agreed to buy the company, and the deal closed in 2025.

Factories

• Sestri Ponente works · Genoa, Liguria — Original 1884 site; aircraft assembly after the 1964 split
• Finale Ligure works · Finale Ligure, Liguria — Built 1906; engines and aerostructures
• Pontedera works · Pontedera, Tuscany — Bomber plant destroyed in the war; birthplace of the Vespa, kept by the scooter side in 1964
• Villanova d’Albenga plant · Villanova d’Albenga, Liguria — Opened November 2014; headquarters

People

• Rinaldo Piaggio · founder — Founded the firm in 1884; died 1938
• Enrico Piaggio · son of the founder — Commissioned the Vespa and named it
• Corradino D’Ascanio · aeronautical engineer — Helicopter pioneer who designed the Vespa
• Giovanni Pegna · engineer — Joined in the 1920s; key to Piaggio’s aviation work
• Giuseppe Gabrielli · engineer — Joined in the 1920s alongside Pegna
• Piero Ferrari · investor and chairman — Led the 1998 rescue; chairman until 2014
• Bruno Mussolini · bomber pilot — Killed flying a P.108 prototype on 7 August 1941

Records and firsts

• About twenty records with Piaggio aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s
• P.180 Avanti listed by the FAI as the fastest propeller-driven aircraft in its class