The Falco: the last of the fighting biplanes

How Fiat perfected a design the world was leaving behind

Fiat CR.42 Falco — by the numbers

Baseline: the standard single-seat Fiat CR.42 of the 1940 production blocks — Fiat A.74 R.C.38 radial, two 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT above the cowling, no radio, no armour, no bomb racks. That is the aeroplane roughly 300 of which were on charge when Italy declared war on 10 June 1940, and the one the RAF met over Malta, Libya and Eritrea. Deltas for the tropicalised CR.42AS, the CR.42CN night fighter, the two-seat CR.42B, the German CR.42LW and the one-off CR.42DB are in grey. Two warnings before the figures. First, the top speed is not agreed: English-language references almost always give 441 km/h at 6,100 m, while Italian sources including the Italian Wikipedia entry and several Fiat-derived tables give 430—440 km/h, and service aircraft with mud, patched fabric and no propeller polish were slower than either. Second, weights differ by about 60 kg between the Italian and English tables; both are given. All performance is for a clean airframe, which the CR.42 rarely was after 1941.

Armament & payload

The CR.42 went to war with two machine guns, and two machine guns had stopped being an armament

The Falco's battery was two 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT machine guns in the upper forward fuselage, synchronised to fire through the propeller disc, with about 400 rounds each. In 1935 that was a heavy fighter armament; in 1940, when the Hurricane carried eight guns and the Bf 109E carried two cannon and two guns, it was not an armament at all. The 12.7 mm round itself was good — heavier than the British .303 and effective against fabric and light structure — but two guns firing through a propeller at an effective 575 rounds a minute each put roughly a quarter of the metal into the air that a Hurricane did, and the Breda-SAFAT was notorious for jamming. Italian pilots compensated by closing to 40 or 50 metres, which is exactly what an aeroplane this manoeuvrable allowed them to do and exactly what killed them when the target shot back. The very earliest production aircraft carried one 12.7 mm and one 7.7 mm gun, not two 12.7 mm; ammunition quantities are quoted between 350 and 400 rounds per gun depending on source and installation, and the underwing gun and bomb fits varied from squadron to squadron rather than by any tidy mark number.

Sourcing caveat: ammunition capacity, gun mark and the exact bomb loads carried by CR.42AS and CR.42LW aircraft differ between references, and the underwing fits were often local modifications rather than factory standards, so a "variant" here frequently means a field conversion. Victory claims on all sides in East Africa, Greece and North Africa were substantially inflated; where claims and confirmed losses are both known they are given separately, and where only claims survive that is said.

Variants

Fiat kept building biplane fighters until 1944, and for two or three years there was an argument for it

The uncomfortable question about the CR.42 is not why it fought badly in 1940 but why Italy ordered it at all in 1939, when the Spitfire and the Bf 109E were already in squadron service. The honest answer has four parts, and only one of them is stupidity. First, Fiat had no engine. The A.74 R.C.38 gave 840 cv and nothing better was in production; the German DB 601 was not available and the Italian inline programmes were years from delivering. With that much power, the aerodynamic penalty of the second wing was worth perhaps 30 to 40 km/h against a monoplane of the same weight — and Italy's own monoplanes proved it, because the Fiat G.50 managed 470 km/h and the Macchi C.200 about 500 km/h on the same engine. Second, Celestino Rosatelli's Warren-truss bracing produced a biplane with no rigging wires at all, which closed much of the remaining gap. Third, the Spanish Civil War had been read as a vindication: the CR.32 had done very well there, and both Ethiopia and Spain were fought against disorganised opposition, which gave a flattering impression of what Italian fighters could do. Fourth, and least defensible, Italian fighter pilots lobbied hard for open cockpits and dogfighting agility and the Regia Aeronautica listened to them.

The result was an aeroplane that was genuinely excellent at what it was designed for and immediately irrelevant to what the war turned out to be. The first flight was on 23 May 1938 at Turin-Aeritalia with Valentino Cus at the controls; the type entered service in 1939 and was still coming off the line in 1944. Every published production total should be treated with care: the figures most often quoted are 1,781 or 1,784 aircraft, while counts that include the German-supervised CR.42LWs and all export airframes reach roughly 1,819. What is not in dispute is that this makes the CR.42 the most-produced Italian aircraft of the Second World War — more Falchi were built than Macchi C.200s, C.202s or SM.79s.

Three foreign air forces bought it and all three learned something. Belgium ordered 40 in 1939 for 40 million francs and had received somewhere between 24 and 34 when the Germans came on 10 May 1940 — sources disagree, with Italian references giving 39 or 40 delivered and English ones far fewer. The IIème Groupe de Chasse flew about 35 sorties in four days and Charles Goffin was credited with a Do 17, a Ju 52 and two Bf 109Es, which is a remarkable return; then fourteen Falcos were destroyed on the ground at Brustem by Stukas, and five survivors were captured. Hungary took between 68 and 72 from mid-1938 onwards, flew them over Yugoslavia in April 1941 and then into the Soviet Union, where the 1. Vadász Ezred claimed 25 destroyed for two lost to fighters — a good record against I-16s and I-153s, and one that ended the moment the Soviets fielded anything modern. Sweden bought 72, designated them J 11 and used them for neutrality patrols; Swedish pilots hated them. Thirty and more were lost to accidents and mechanical failure, the type had a bad reputation for spinning, and the Flygvapnet bolted 20 mm of armour behind the pilot before it would send them up. The last J 11s were decommissioned on 14 March 1945 and nineteen were sold off as target tugs.

Two operational episodes deserve to be named plainly. The Corpo Aereo Italiano sent to Belgium in the autumn of 1940 — 50 CR.42s of 18° Gruppo at Ursel, 45 G.50s at Maldegem, BR.20 bombers at Melsbroek — was a political gesture that cost lives for nothing. It was the wrong aircraft, the wrong weather and the wrong month: the Luftwaffe had already lost the daylight battle, the Falchi had no radio and no cockpit heating for a North Sea winter, and German formations could not fly slowly enough to stay with them. On 11 November 1940 ten BR.20s of 43° Stormo and forty CR.42s of 18° Gruppo were sent against Harwich; the G.50 escort never arrived because of the weather. Some thirty Hurricanes of Nos. 46 and 257 Squadrons and Spitfires of No. 41 Squadron met them over the Thames Estuary. Three BR.20s and two CR.42s were shot down, a third CR.42 force-landed with an overheating engine, and the RAF lost nothing at all: two fighters were slightly damaged. A second sweep on 23 November put 29 CR.42s over the Kent coast between Folkestone and Dungeness; the Italians claimed five Spitfires and got none, and lost two more Falchi. The CR.42s went home in early January 1941. Against that, the East African campaign is the type's real record — 412ª, 413ª and 414ª Squadriglie in Eritrea produced better results with the CR.42 than anyone anywhere else, because in that theatre it was fighting Gladiators and Wellesleys rather than Spitfires.

The airframe sequence follows. Quantities are given where a specific source supports them, and left out where they do not.

Fiat CR.41 (1936, 1 prototype)

Rosatelli's radial-engined development of the CR.32, on a Gnome-Rhône 14K. It did not go into production but it established the layout — radial engine, sesquiplane wings, Warren bracing — that the CR.42 refined.

CR.42 (first flight 23 May 1938; production 1939—1944)

The production single-seater. Two 12.7 mm guns, open cockpit, no radio, no armour. Roughly 300 were on charge on 10 June 1940 and about 60 were still flyable at the armistice of 8 September 1943. Detail changes across production blocks were minor; the CR.42bis and CR.42ter designations refer chiefly to gun fit rather than to distinct production runs.

CR.42AS (Africa Settentrionale, from 1940)

Tropicalised fighter-bomber: sand filter for the A.74, two underwing racks for 100 kg bombs, desert equipment. The most numerous operational sub-type after the plain fighter, and the version in which the CR.42 did most of its useful work from 1941 onwards.

CR.42CN (Caccia Notturna, from 1940)

Night fighter with flame-damped extended exhausts and, on some aircraft, two searchlights under the lower wing. No radar. It nevertheless had some success against RAF night raids on northern Italy in 1942. Capitano Giorgio Graffer intercepted a Whitley over Turin on the night of 13—14 August 1940, found his guns jammed, and rammed it.

CR.42B / Biposto (about 40, built by Agusta and Caproni Trento)

Two-seat trainer with the fuselage lengthened to 8.94 m for a second cockpit. Maximum speed fell to about 430 km/h. Used for fighter conversion training and, later, for liaison.

CR.42 Egeo (1941)

Long-range version with a 100-litre auxiliary tank and a radio, built for the Aegean. Eleven aircraft of the 155ª Squadriglia flew 900 km from Rhodes via Aleppo to Mosul in May 1941 to support the Iraqi revolt, wore Iraqi markings, were operational for four days, lost one aircraft in combat on 28 May and abandoned three more. The whole episode lasted under a fortnight.

ICR.42 (1940, 1 prototype)

Twin-float seaplane conversion tested in 1941: 423 km/h, 950 km range, 9,000 m ceiling. Not proceeded with.

CR.42DB (March 1941, 1 prototype)

A CR.42 re-engined with a 1,010 hp Daimler-Benz DB 601 inline. It reached 518 km/h and remains the fastest biplane ever flown. The Regia Aeronautica did not pursue it, correctly: every DB 601 Italy could obtain was needed for the Macchi C.202, which did 600 km/h on the same engine.

CR.42LW (1943—44; 200 ordered, about 150 built, 112 accepted)

German night ground-attack version ordered from Fiat after the September 1943 armistice: flame dampers, two 12.7 mm guns, four 50 kg bombs. Allied bombing of the Turin works kept the delivered total well below the order. Flown by Nachtschlachtgruppe 9 in Italy and Nachtschlachtgruppe 7 in Croatia and Austria until the last weeks of the war. That a 1938 Italian biplane was in German front-line production in 1944 says a good deal about both air forces by that date.

Export designations (1939—41)

Belgium: 40 ordered, between 24 and 34 delivered from March 1940, no separate designation. Hungary: 68 to 72 aircraft in three lots from 1938, flown as CR.42 without a Hungarian designation. Sweden: 72 as the J 11, delivered February 1940 to September 1941, the largest single export order. Spain: two CR.42bis in 1939. Finland ordered twelve, rejected them, and they went to Sweden.

Survivors, precisely. Four original CR.42 airframes exist and none is airworthy. MM5701, a 95ª Squadriglia aircraft flown by Sergente Pietro Salvadori, force-landed with an overheating engine on the beach at Orford Ness, Suffolk, on 11 November 1940 during the Harwich raid; it was captured intact, test-flown in mock combat by the Air Fighting Development Unit in 1941, kept after 1943, restored in the 1970s and is on static display at the Royal Air Force Museum London under museum serial BT474 — the only CR.42 anywhere in original wartime Italian markings on an airframe that flew operationally. Swedish J 11 no. 2543, marked "9", is displayed at the Flygvapenmuseum in Linköping. Swedish J 11 no. 2542 crashed into terrain in Kiruna municipality on 13 April 1942, killing Bertil Klintman, and was recovered in 1983; its subsequent history is genuinely disputed, with English sources placing it with The Fighter Collection at Duxford under long-term restoration to fly and Italian ones recording it as transferred to the Italian Air Force on 25 May 1994 — the two accounts cannot both be right and neither could be confirmed here. The aircraft displayed as MM4653 at the Museo storico dell'Aeronautica Militare at Vigna di Valle is a composite reconstruction, roughly 60 per cent original material drawn from wrecks in Sweden, Italy and France, and not a single surviving airframe. There are no flying reproductions. Two further claims about this aeroplane need qualifying. It is routinely called the last biplane fighter to enter production anywhere; the Soviet Polikarpov I-153 was contemporary and far more numerous, so the defensible version of the claim is that the CR.42 was the last new-design biplane fighter put into large-scale production by a major air force and that it stayed in production later, into 1944, than any other. And on the last biplane air-to-air victory in Europe: on 8 February 1945 ten CR.42LWs of Stab and 2./Nachtschlachtgruppe 7 flew from Agram-Gorica against partisans near Sisak in Croatia and were attacked by P-38 Lightnings of the 14th Fighter Group; three Falchi were shot down and an unidentified German pilot claimed a Lightning. If allowed, that is the last biplane victory of the war. It is not well corroborated: USAAF records are reported to show no matching loss on that date. The competing claim is better documented and earlier — on 2 September 1944 Master Sergeant František Cyprich of the Slovak insurgent Combined Squadron shot down a Hungarian-marked Ju 52/3m in Avia B-534.217 during the Slovak National Uprising, though no Hungarian loss record confirming it has been traced either. The fair statement is that the Avia holds the last biplane victory anyone has been able to document, and the CR.42 holds the last one anyone claimed.

From the last biplane to the war’s end

Eight chapters in the Falco’s war

The Falco in pictures

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See the Falco in context

Was the Falco the best biplane fighter of the war — or a beautiful anachronism? This short history follows the CR.42 from Fiat’s drawing board through the Battle of Britain and the African wars to its place as the last front-line fighter biplane.

Video: “Fiat CR.42 — The Best Biplane Fighter of WW2?” by AllthingsWW2 (~88,000 views). Embedded via YouTube.

Where the Falco fought

The Falco, by the numbers

The CR.42 fought a war it was never really equipped to win, and its record is a mix of genuine successes and inevitable losses. Superb in a turning fight and available in huge numbers, it did real damage where it could dictate the terms — and was picked apart where it could not. It was, above all, the last front-line fighter biplane, closing a chapter of air warfare that began in 1914.

Claims and losses in the Mediterranean and African air wars are hard to reconcile between Italian, British and other records; the figures above reflect the type’s scale and its most famous exploits rather than a precise tally.

Fiat CR.42 Falco — questions & answers

Related aircraft

Where these facts come from

• RAF Museum — Fiat CR.42 FalcoThe Battle of Britain survivor MM5701
• Vintage Aviation News — surviving FalcosThe world’s surviving CR.42s
• Key.Aero — Italy’s forgotten fighterHistory & combat record
• San Diego Air & Space MuseumArchive photography of the type

Figures are drawn from museum and reference sources and cross-checked; where sources differ, the most commonly cited value is given. Armament and performance varied between the Falco’s several sub-types.