Out of Gabardini

CANSA grew on the airfield at Cameri, near Novara, out of the business of Giuseppe Gabardini, whose company and flying school had long been part of Italian aviation. When Gabardini’s activities ceased, Costruzioni Aeronautiche Novaresi took over; it developed his Lictor 90 into the Alfa Romeo-powered Lictor 130. On 18 May 1939 Mussolini himself toured its workshops at Cameri.

Fiat’s second design office

That same year Fiat bought a majority stake and sent engineer Giacomo Mosso from its own design office as deputy director. Mosso’s team produced a burst of designs: the C.5 trainer, of which 65 were built for the Regia Aeronautica, the C.6 Falchetto aerobatic biplane, the FC.12 attack aircraft and the twin-engined FC.20, a ground-attack machine with a 37 mm cannon in its nose. Only the FC.20bis reached a squadron, in tiny numbers, weeks before the armistice of September 1943.

From warplanes to trolleybuses

After the armistice the German occupiers stopped all aircraft work at CANSA. The design office tried, in vain, to keep going with a motor tricycle and a railcar. After the war the name lived on in road transport: in the 1950s CANSA bodied the Fiat 2401 trolleybus for cities from Turin to Ancona. Today Cameri is home to Leonardo’s F-35 final assembly line.

Továrny

• Cameri works · Cameri, Novara — Airfield workshops visited by Mussolini in 1939

Lidé

• Giacomo Mosso · deputy director, chief designer — Moved from Fiat in 1939; designed C.5, C.6, FC.12, FC.20
• Giuseppe Gabardini · predecessor — Aviation pioneer whose business CANSA succeeded