Seaplanes on Lake Maggiore

On 12 August 1915 Domenico Lorenzo Santoni and Luigi Capè founded the Società Idrovolanti Alta Italia, the Seaplane Company of Upper Italy, and set it to building flying boats for the Italian armed forces. Its S.16 flying boat was robust enough that in 1925 Francesco de Pinedo flew one from Rome to Australia and on to Tokyo, a journey that ended on 26 September after five months. Around the end of the First World War the firm absorbed the Savoia company, and in 1922 it hired the engineer Alessandro Marchetti. His name, joined to Savoia’s, became one of the most famous brands in interwar aviation.

Twin hulls and a new English word

Marchetti’s breakthrough was the S.55, a strange twin-hulled flying boat with the cockpit buried in the thick wing between the hulls. It first flew in August 1924 and by 1926 had set 14 world records for speed, altitude and distance with payload. Its fame came from the Atlantic. Air Marshal Italo Balbo led mass formation crossings, culminating on 1 July 1933 when 24 S.55Xs left Orbetello for the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago. The feat so impressed the English-speaking world that a ‘Balbo’ became the word for a large formation of aircraft. More than 240 S.55s were built across all variants.

The damned hunchback

Marchetti then turned to trimotors. The SM.79 Sparviero began as a fast eight-seat transport for the 1934 MacRobertson race and first flew on 28 September 1934. Between 1937 and 1939 it set 26 world records and was for a time the fastest medium bomber in the world. Its crews liked it and called it il gobbo maledetto, the damned hunchback, after its dorsal hump. Some 612 had been delivered when Italy entered the war; as a torpedo bomber it struck hard at Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, though by 1943 an aircraft could expect to be shot down after about three missions. Around 1,200 to 1,300 were built.

Trimotors to Tokyo

The trimotor family was huge. The SM.81 Pipistrello, first flown on 8 February 1934, served in Ethiopia and Spain and 535 were built. The SM.82 Marsupiale set a closed-circuit distance record of 10,000 km in 1939 and, in October 1940, four of them flew 4,200 km in 15 hours to bomb the British-run refineries in Bahrain. Most audacious of all, an SM.75 left Guidonia on 29 June 1942 and flew secretly across the Soviet Union to Japanese-held Mongolia and on to Tokyo, carrying new codes, before returning to Odessa in a single 29-hour leg.

Bombed out, renamed, reborn

The factories that built all this were high-priority targets for Allied bombers and were virtually destroyed by the last months of the war. The royal name Savoia became an embarrassment, and in 1943–1944 the company dropped it and went back to SIAI, becoming SIAI-Marchetti. The new company tried railway equipment and lorries, went bankrupt in 1951, re-emerged in 1953, built helicopters for Agusta and found lasting fame with the SF.260 trainer. Its story continues under that name.

Fabrieken

• Sesto Calende works · Sesto Calende, Lake Maggiore, Lombardy — Seaplane works; heavily bombed in the war
• Vergiate · Vergiate, Varese — Airfield where the SM.81 first flew in 1934; later SIAI-Marchetti helicopter site

Mensen

• Alessandro Marchetti · chief designer from 1922 — 1884–1966; designer of the S.55 and SM.79
• Italo Balbo · Air Marshal — Led the S.55 mass Atlantic crossings
• Francesco de Pinedo · naval aviator — Rome–Australia–Tokyo in an S.16, 1925
• Adriano Bacula · test pilot — First flights of the SM.81 and S.73

Records en primeurs

• S.55: 14 world records for speed, altitude and distance with payload by 1926
• S.55X: 24-aircraft formation crossing from Orbetello to Chicago, July 1933
• SM.79: 26 world records, 1937–1939
• SM.82: world closed-circuit distance record, 10,000 km at 239.67 km/h, 1939
• SM.75: secret Rome–Tokyo flight, June–July 1942