It is January 1921, and a crowd has gathered on the shore of Lago Maggiore near Sesto Calende. They are staring at a houseboat. Or a cathedral. Or perhaps a floating lumber yard that has sprouted wings — nine of them — and eight bellowing American engines. The thing is 77 feet long, 30 feet tall, and looks like three Caproni bombers crashed into a Venetian ferry and nobody bothered to separate the wreckage. Its creator, a 34-year-old Italian aviation pioneer named Giovanni Battista Caproni, says it will carry 100 passengers across the Atlantic Ocean. He is not joking. The Caproni Ca.60 Transaereo — known variously as the Noviplano, the Capronissimo, or simply "that thing on the lake" — is one of the most audacious, beautiful, and doomed aircraft ever conceived. It flew exactly once and a half, crashed spectacularly, and has haunted aviation historians, model-builders, and Hayao Miyazaki ever since.

A Bomber-Builder Dreams of Airlines

Gianni Caproni had made his name building heavy bombers for the Italian military during the First World War. His Ca.3 biplanes and Ca.4 triplanes were among the largest aircraft of the conflict — multi-engine beasts that dropped ordnance on Austrian trenches while their crews froze in open cockpits. When the war ended and the military contracts evaporated, Caproni faced a choice every arms manufacturer knows: pivot or perish. He pivoted toward the sky. As early as 1913 — aged just 27 — Caproni had told the Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport that "aircraft with a capacity of one hundred and more passengers" would soon become a reality. Now, with hangars full of surplus bombers and a workforce of skilled carpenters and riggers, he decided to prove it. The idea was radical. In 1919, no airline carried more than a handful of passengers. Converted bombers served as airliners, their bomb bays refitted with wicker seats. Caproni's vision was different: a purpose-built airliner, designed from the keel up for civilian comfort and transatlantic range. He patented the concept on 6 February 1919. Reality intervened. The lake was too low for the slipway. Thirty wing ribs broke and needed emergency repair. A starter motor failed. Caproni, furious, kept his workers up all night. On 9 February the Transaereo finally touched water, its engines running, test pilot Federico Semprini at the controls. Semprini was a good choice: a former military instructor famous for having once looped a Caproni Ca.3 heavy bomber — a feat roughly equivalent to barrel-rolling a school bus. The initial taxi tests went well. The aircraft was responsive, manoeuvrable, stable on the water. It did tend to pitch up at the bow, so Caproni loaded 300 kilograms of ballast forward. On 12 February (or possibly 2 March — sources disagree), Semprini pushed the Transaereo to 80 km/h and it lifted off the lake. The flight was brief but stable. Caproni was satisfied.

Ninety Seconds of Glory, Then the Lake

The second flight came on 4 March 1921. The weather was clear. Semprini opened the throttles. At 100 km/h the Noviplano hauled itself into the air — and immediately pitched up into a dangerously steep climb. Semprini cut power. The tail dropped. The nose rose further. The aircraft stalled, hung for a sickening moment, then slammed tail-first into the surface of Lago Maggiore. The front third of the hull shattered on impact. The forward wing set collapsed into the water. The central and rear sections stayed afloat. Semprini and both flight engineers scrambled out, unhurt. The Ca.60 also lives on in an unexpected place: Hayao Miyazaki's 2013 film The Wind Rises, where Caproni appears as a recurring dream figure, encouraging the young protagonist to build beautiful aircraft regardless of how they might be used. Miyazaki — an aviation obsessive — clearly saw something in the Transaereo that went beyond its failure. Something about the scale of the ambition, the refusal to think small, the willingness to put nine wings on a houseboat and dare it to fly.

Beautiful Disaster

Was the Ca.60 a failure? Obviously. It flew for under two minutes and was destroyed. Its pitch-control system was fundamentally flawed. The sandbag problem was a rookie oversight. No transatlantic flight was ever going to happen. But calling the Transaereo a failure misses the point. In 1921, the idea that an aircraft could carry 100 people anywhere was science fiction. The world's airlines were flying biplanes with four seats. Caproni was designing for a future that would not arrive until the Boeing 707 — thirty-seven years later. He got the engineering wrong. He got the vision right. The path of progress is, as he said, strewn with suffering. And occasionally, with nine wings floating in a lake. Sources: Gregory Alegi, "The castle door, the mooring pylon and the Transaereo" (WW1 Aero, 2006); Rosario Abate, Gregory Alegi & Giorgio Apostolo, Aeroplani Caproni (Museo Caproni, 1992); Enzo Angelucci & Paolo Matricardi, Guida agli aeroplani di tutto il mondo (Mondadori, 1976); Museo dell’Aeronautica Gianni Caproni; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum