709 km/h on Lake Garda

On 23 October 1934, Warrant Officer Francesco Agello pointed a long red floatplane down the course over Lake Garda and averaged 709.209 km/h. The Macchi M.C.72 held the absolute world speed record for any aircraft for five years, and its record for a piston-engined seaplane still stands. It had cost dearly: two test pilots, Giovanni Monti and Stanislao Bellini, died trying to tame it before the British engineer Rod Banks supplied a fuel that made its Fiat engine behave.

Carriages, Nieuports and a captured Lohner

Macchi had begun far from racing. The Macchi family of Varese built carriages, and in 1913 Giulio Macchi joined the French Nieuport company to make Nieuport monoplanes under licence by Lake Varese. When the war came, the firm copied a captured Austro-Hungarian Lohner flying boat as the L.1 and went on to its own designs; the nimble M.5 flying-boat fighter of 1917 was built 244 times.

The Schneider years

In 1922 the company hired a young designer, Mario Castoldi, to build speed. His M.39 won the Schneider Trophy at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on 13 November 1926 in the hands of Mario de Bernardi, who four days later set a world speed record of 416.618 km/h. The later M.52 and M.67 could not beat Britain’s Supermarines, and the M.C.72, built for the 1931 contest, was not ready in time. It took its revenge in the record books instead.

Castoldi’s fighters

Castoldi’s racing experience fed the fighters. The radial-engined C.200 Saetta first flew on 24 December 1937, 1,151 built. Fitted with a licence-built Daimler-Benz engine it became the C.202 Folgore of 1940, an effective dogfighter on every front, 1,150 built, and then the C.205 Veltro. The British test pilot Eric Brown, who flew a captured one, called it one of the finest aircraft he ever flew. Only 262 Veltros were built before Italy’s armistice.

From Folgore to jet trainers

Peace forced reinvention. Ermanno Bazzocchi’s MB.308 light aircraft flew on 19 January 1947, and his MB-326 jet trainer of 1957 became the company’s export success, with about 800 built between 1961 and 1975, including licence production in Australia, Brazil and South Africa. Its successor, the MB-339, flew on 12 August 1976. In 1961 the firm shortened its name to Aermacchi, and in 1981 it was reorganised as Aermacchi S.p.A. The Aermacchi story continues on its own page.

Fabrikalar

• Varese works · Shores of Lake Varese, Lombardy

İnsanlar

• Giulio Macchi · founder
• Mario Castoldi · chief designer from 1922 — Designer of the racers and the C-series fighters
• Francesco Agello · pilot — Set the 1934 seaplane speed record
• Mario de Bernardi · pilot — Won the 1926 Schneider Trophy
• Ermanno Bazzocchi · designer of the MB.308 and MB-326

Rekorlar ve ilkler

• Schneider Trophy, 13 November 1926, M.39, Mario de Bernardi, 396.698 km/h
• World speed record 416.618 km/h, 17 November 1926, M.39
• World speed record 682 km/h, 10 April 1933, M.C.72
• World speed record 709.209 km/h, 23 October 1934, M.C.72, still the piston seaplane record