Italian design is lauded all over the world as perhaps the best aesthetic mankind has yet achieved.
However, some Italian designs have
not become so famous or iconic.
Many futuristic concepts devised in the heady, overly-optimistic atmosphere immediately following W.W. I have been forgotten today.
Perhaps none exemplify this utter ignominy better than a fighter designed in 1920 by Ciccolini "Chico" Futurissimo.
Long before such things became commonplace, he envisaged a cantilever-winged monoplane fighter with a monocoque fuselage, an enclosed cockpit and amazing, ahead-of-its-time streamlining that even extended all the way down to a magnificently spatted undercarriage.
Chico could hardly sleep once his rough "back-of-the-napkin" doodles had become complete drawings. He even built a small wind-tunnel test model hoping to interest one of the large Italian aircraft manufacturers.
It was with great anticipation that Chico awaited word that his radical design had been accepted. By anyone.
He tried to distract himself with a Night at the Opera followed by a Day at the Races but to no avail. For all his worry, it would not be Duck Soup and most that saw his proposal huffed "Horse feathers!" before consigning it to the circular file.
Unfortunately, there was a glut of aircraft left over from the Great War and nobody was interested in trying to sell combat aircraft in a saturated market, a certain losing proposition.
Also, by then Chico's embrace of radical Marxism had become widely known.
As if that weren't enough, he'd already been black-listed from most reputable aircraft establishments due to his problematic involvement in flight testing.
So his incredibly prescient design sense would end up in the dustbin of history and he would be totally forgotten along with his amazing forward-thinking little fighter.
To this day, most experts completely disregard Chico Futurissimo as a charlatan and doubt he ever came up with anything capable of actual flight. However, his wind-tunnel model and tattered blueprints were recently found in an old desk abandoned when the Fiat conglomerate moved its engineering team to a new, modern campus.
While the experts may think this was just a flight of fancy, we know better.
Brian da Basher