The Piaggio P.119; A Fighter with A Unique Engine Set Up
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ก.ย. 2024
- When it comes to the questions of just what sort of engine to use and where to place it on an aircraft, the Italian Piaggio company likes to keep things... different.
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This is one of those concepts that really just needed a few tweaks to work well. Ejector exhausts, wing root intakes and the cooling fan setup from the FW190, for instance...
I wounder if just a few tweaks would have solved many issues because generally speaking it had important cooling problems and suffered severe vibrations when shooting all the guns..
I have 5 Piaggio machines . All are full of unique design features , work spectacularly well , and look absolutely beautiful . This film made me chuckle . "Piaggio didn't get that memo" . That should be their motto.
I hope you are including the curry hook in those features. Best thing ever.
I don't suppose one of them is an Avanti?
@@jackroutledge352 Let me check. nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. . . . . . . . . . . . Avanti ! ... Oh yes , that one at the back . I use it to go to Lidl for bog roll.
@@Katy_Jones All but one . Curry hadn't been invented when they built that one. It HAS got Rod gearchange though , Piaggio's finest moment .
@@flashgordon3715 Yes buddy. Many scooters .
On paper it looks like an excellent carrier aircraft: large fuel capacity, heavy armament, excellent forward visibility and rugged, widely spaced landing gear.
I am constantly astonished at your ability to find so many obscure and under covered aircraft. Remarkable job!
Thanks!
I always thought that putting the engine behind the pilot would've been a great idea for a dedicated carrier based Naval fighter, to give awesome visibility on landing, like the opposite of a Corsair...
Have a look at the Bell Airobonita. A carrier-equipped tailwheel P-39.
Take in account one thing that would be bad in such setting, in crash landing engine block could reap from mount and go forward... right in to cockpit. And it's also more problematic to maintain in such placement.
The accident rate from the stability loss wouldnt be worth
On carriers the preference was for radials because they were much easier to maintain, not just in terms of access, but in terms of what parts you can get in the middle of the ocean. Basically all the USN carrier aircraft of WW2 (and many beyond) used the same two or three types of radial. Just 4 engines (Wright R-1820, Wright R-2600, P&W R-1830 and P&W-2800 powered the Buffalo, Wildcat, Hellcat, Tigercat, Bearcat, Dauntless, Avenger, Devastator, Helldiver, F3F, Catalina, Coronado, Privateer, Mariner, Seahawk, Albatross, Duck, Tracker, Trader and Tracer!
It would have had some issues that would have been negative. But it would have been like a big piece of armor to protect the pilot as most attacks come from the rear
That design would have been a good candidate for an early experimental jet.
Like a dh vampire?
@@babaganoush6106 They could have kept the guns up front and fed a jet engine through that intake. It would have been the great-great-grandfather to the F-16!
Little known, but Republic Aviation in the US did some design work on a similar concept in 1942-1943 called the XP-69. Radical engine behind the pilot. No prototype was built before the project was cancelled in 1943 only a mockup was finished for wind tunnel tests.
Nice.
Mid-engined aircraft do have one common problem - that of having a large mass in their centre. If they entered an accelerated spin, that big mass in the middle made them awkward to recover before the ground rose up to smite them. A verse of an old USAAF song went like this:
‘Don’t give me a P-39,
With an engine that’s mounted behind,
It’ll tumble and roll, and dig a big hole,
Don’t give me a P-39!’
Think that’s a bad idea check out the SPAD S.A.4. How would you like to be the gunner on that beauty? 🤦♂️
Chuck Yeager would have disagreed. He said all the rumors about the Airacobra were passed around by people who never flew one.
@@Mishn0, Chuck Yeager said a lot of things, particularly things that he thought made him look good.
The declassified US Army Air Force report on P-39Q spin testing is available as a pdf online. In it, it describes horrible spin characteristics and concludes with an accident report detailing how the test pilot was forced to bail out on the second flight after the aircraft entered an unrecoverable spin.
Chuck Yeager was a blow-hard. Bob Hoover was a far better pilot and by all contemporary accounts, much more of a gentleman.
@@Mishn0 Plenty of other pilots say otherwise. If you dig around you can find them and their take on the Airacobra. In my eyes Yeager was a bit full of himself and people seem to treat him as some god. He was awesome , no doubt about it but there were lots of other pilots in the world at the same time as well. His biography is good but at the end of the day he was just another man. Typical American hero worship. I guess we all need heros.
@@Pete-tq6in You pretty much nailed it. Yeager marketed himself perfectly as the perfect American hero and we ate it up. I too think Hoover was a much more likable character and every bit as good , if not better pilot. Not hating Yeager but am kinda tired of him.
Piaggio had a lot of out-there designs throughout the 30s and 40s.
I'm looking forward to more of them being covered.
Resembles the Dutch Koolhoven FK55 prototype, first flew in 1938. Though that was powered by a liquid cooled engine. Note that air cooled radial aircraft engines were also used to power the Sherman tank (using a fan to provide cooling air). So it’s not completely wild idea to build it in an enclosure.
Some Shermans, not all. There was also a Guiberson four-stroke diesel radial engine in the M3 light tank.
And the first usefull helicopters like the Piasecci also had radials in the back.
@@JMGlider And a lot of Sikorsky helicopters had a radial in the nose cowling. H-19, S22, S58, H-34, etc.
As well as its predecessor, the Lee/Grant, which was much the same mechanically.
Beautiful looking plane.
Oh yeah. I love Italian experimental planes, they were way ahead of their time in some aspects. Too bad that none of these ideas were especially successful.
Its a shame as most where to complex to build quick and in large numbers due to new technologies, the same for italian battleships . verry acurate range finders and guns sadly their shell quality controll was well not the best to put it lightly .
You can thank Italian Fascism for not developing these experiments.
@@toomanyhobbies2011 What a dramatic contrast to the Renaissance era which brought forth some of the greatest innovations in engineering.
The fascism may be bad, bt we all know, atleast the train runs on time :D
@@twddersharkmarine7774 only between 7:39 am and 7;45 PM
As usual Italian mechanical aesthetics are amazing. Thanks Ed.
Italy had so many innovative and beautiful designs that are relatively unknown thanks for letting me know about another
This looks like it would have been incredible if they have continued with it.
Another surprising airframe - marvellous! It looks graceful and deadly at the same time: plus, with that speed and ceiling it would have been a very dangerous opponent.
Never heard of this concept by Piaggio 👍
I've only recently started watching your videos. The more I watch the better I like them. Thank you.
Years ago I was reading victor suvorov's memoirs about working in the GRU.
He noted that the soviets were quite interested in acquiring Italian defense technologies as they recognized the quality of Italian engineering.
Look at the Bartini Beriev VVA-14.
This is one of those ‘if’ designs .
If Piaggio started work on this plane earlier it could’ve entered the war.
It’s kinda ironic that an Italian airplane company would make a mid engine fighter since Italian car companies would make mid engine sports cars years later.
How is that ironic and not just a coincidence? Especially when other nations also tried mid-engine airplanes
@@derrickstorm6976 True, I just thought it was ironic.
Okay, so it was a coincidence and other countries also tried a mid engine layout (I.e. Bell’s Air-cobra)
Fascinating - I have never heard of this airplane but it certainly was unique and seemed to have great promise. As with so many other clever Italian weapon systems though, they didn’t follow through and get it into production.
I do enjoy you're bringing to our attention such obscure and interesting aircraft. Thank you.
Instead they took the wheels of the landing gear, strapped on a 2 stroke engine from a pasta maker, sat beautiful babes on top and called it Vespa. Italy has its priorities straight.^^
@Ed Nash - Fascinating video. That you for posting.
Great stuff once again Ed. I guess they decided to concentrate on Vespa's ! Although they did construct a number of different aircraft post war .
Alright brother, got to say you have a great thing going here. Good voice, good delivery, good visuals, thank you for your quality content.
Cheers! Appreciate the kind words.
A totally new one on me. Great stuff Ed!
Very good looking aircraft from the front. Looks sort of early jet-age-like. Imagine if it had gotten the prototype go-ahead allready in 1939... Perhaps we would have been talking about "the italian aircobra".
Such beautiful lines, true Italian designer vision
The Piaggio P119 was an interesting airplane with the Piaggio P.XV RC 45 radial 1,500 hp engine and was planned to install the Piaggio P.XV RC 50 with 1,650 hp but never installed but it had serious cooling problems and the cooling flaps had to be always open creating drag. Apparently it flew well but as stated on the video there is very little info because it was heavily bombed. Even if have been produced it was not built for mass production with complicated metal construction and it would have taken a long time to sort out teething problems and was not faster than the excellent Fiat G.55 Centauro, the Macchi C.205 Veltro and the Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario all powered with the licence production Fiat RA.1050 R.C.58 Tifone practically a copy of the DB 605A-1
Good job 👍👍👍
Ahah! You found one I've never heard of before, bravo Mr. Nash! What a fascinating design! That image at 3:22 reminds me of a love child between an F-16 & maybe a Reggiane Re.2005? LOL
That's amazing, I had never heard of this. It's quite Studio Ghibli
An Italian aircobra with a round motor . Someone had a dream .
I had an understanding that besides the experimental inline engines for the racing float planes, there wasn’t any good Italian made inline engines till licensed production of the DB 601. Even the radial engines were license built French designs Piaggio XI which was from the Gnome Rhone Mistral Major 14k.
Of course Piaggio's QC being what it was it'd no doubt have shaken itself to pieces sooner or later..
Yes, but it would have looked so elegant while doing so!
Piaggio, the company that invented the scooter motorbike design. Interesting company.
In theory placing the engine behind the pilot would reduce the plane's rotational moment of inertia, making it less resistant to turning and perhaps requiring less area for control surfaces. The added complexity of cooling and getting that power to the propeller are drawbacks, and the cockpit becomes a place you really don't want to be in the event of a crash.
Indeed! Not fun at all!
Check out my video on the Spad SA for an utter death trap.
In the event of a crash you don't want to be in any plane, you're unlikely to survive no matter where the engine is. If the force was large enough to crush the cockpit with the engine behind you, you wouldn't have survived if the engine had been in front.
Enjoyed the video and I gave it a Thumbs Up
Honestly I love the look. Like something from "The Wind Also Rises"
That said, could you picture this thing with a smooth fairing and a TON of naca ducts?
Exactly! You took the words right out of my mouth. Fw 190 radial fan, and naca ducts....id even have tried a mesh engine section cover...they say edison made over a thousand lightbulbs before he got it right....
I can picture this thing possibly with a duct running all the way down the fuselage to the tail empennage, and then post-war "adapted" to carry an early centrifugal turbine...
Yet another obscure but interesting aircraft design brought to our attention from a (excellent) channel that specialises in this kind of thing. Its also noteworthy that - unlike the Airacobra - a more modern tricycle undercarriage arrangement wasn't attempted with this Piaggio. The prototype might not have suffered the same sad fate had it been so designed methinks.
Amazing channel .I'm amazed how many aircraft I never knew about . Thank you
More than welcome :)
Rolls Royce did some design work, 1943/4, I believe, for a mid engined fighter and created a prototype. The prototype used the wings & tail assembly from a P51. The intent, I believe, was to use more of the unused space in the fuselage, behind the engine location for the supercharger, run more efficient ducting & intercooler. The existing front engined fighters of the day were limited in space for the supercharger and associated bits & pieces. Obviously the engine was the RR Merlin or Griffon.
Those crazy Italians! Bravo!
Thanks for the information
By the end of the war everyone was thinking of putting the engine behind the pilot. In fact they were moving the pilot up near the spinner. Gave a much better view for the pilot, especially when taxiing. Some of these were actually built, some didn't get beyond the design stage. There was the XP-75, the Me-509, Rolls Royce's proposed design to take the Crecy engine (this was supposed to use P-51 wings and got to the point of a papier mache mock-up).. Not to mention pretty much all the post-war jets. Also, almost everyone was switching to nosewheels. The P-39 was ahead of its time.
One of your best Ed; well done on the 50k barrier, it speaks volumes about you and your channel. I'll bet you a bottle of Scotch* this plane appears in Warthunder or WoW in the next 18 months as another 'blueprint' design with amazing superpowers!
*single malt if you win the bet, LIDL's blended if you lose ;-)
interesting concept
very interesting video as always and quite a beautiful plane i must say!
The Kyushu J7W Shinden sort of had a centrally mounted radial engine. It was a little aft of center driving a pusher propeller.
I can envision a big toothy paint scheme on the air intake.
Also, it's not too difficult to imagine it with a Whittle type jet engine in place of the radial, similar to the Ryan Fireball.
a friend of my grandfather worked on this and told him that THREE planes were readied, one with no armament and just wind tunnel testing one destined for stress load and the last one the actual “official” plane, capable of 740 km/h…
the first real chopper that went into serial production, focke-achgelis fa 223 drache also had a mid mounted radial engines as power plant but using that set up in a fixed wing desing is realy weird.
Piaggio made the auxiliary power unit for bombers that was used to power Vespa scooters.
wait a minute I thought the Italians didn't produce a radial for much of the war with over an 800 HP rating, I didn't know they built radials that large
Yes they did but they developed it far too late to be putted in production! The Piaggio produced the P.108 of similar size of the B-17 that was equipped with four air-cooled 18-cylinder P.XII radial engines, which suffered from reliability problems, but produced 1,350 hp with 1,500 hp at takeoff. The P.XII was basically a two Piaggio P.X engines in tandem, which were modified, by Piaggio, versions of the lousy French Gnome-Rhône 9K Mistral made under license.
Italians produced 1000 hp radials since the mid '30s (1000 hp Piaggio P.XI and 1030 hp Fiat A.80. Also the 960 hp Fiat A.74 and the 950 hp Alfa Romeo 128 were close).
In 1939 had been omologated the 1500 hp Piaggio P.XII and the 1600 hp Alfa Romeo 135 (the second never reached a sufficeint reliability, but the first one had probably been the best radial that used standard 87 octane fuel of the war). In 1941 had been homologated the 1700hp Piaggio P.XV (97 octane fuelled version of the P.XII).
@@neutronalchemist3241 true but they were a modified version of the lousy French Gnome-Rhône 9K Mistral. Hence suffering readability issues that was never really solved much also because of the low quality 87 octane fuel that afflicted all the engines made by the Axis. The life span of the DB 605 also for license production was about 50 hours use before being overhauled as this fuel was very hard on those engines.
@@paoloviti6156 "modification" in VERY broad terms, since it had double the row and more than double the power. "Hence" means nothing when the engines are so different.
The reliability problems were on the first engines produced. Those of well known engines like the BMW 801 or the P&W R2800 lasted for longer before being ironed out. It has to be taken into account that, due to the different productive capability, the "first engines that gave problems" (a common occurrence in WWII era) were an higher percentage of the total production for the Italians, even if they were numerically fewer.
The TBO of Italian licenced DB engines was of 60 hours. Packard Merlins rarely lasted 100 hours (and, due to the different mission profiles, most of those hours were at military/emergency power for Italian engines and at cruise speed for Packard Merlins).
The P&W R-2800 started service with an expected life of 25 hours (then the 5 cylinders in top rear position had to be replaced without even checking them, while, for the DBs, at the overhaul the cylinders were checked and rebored only if needed). Only some thousands engines later it became of several hundreds hours, then of thousands. The difference between the outstanding P&W R-2800 and the unreliable Alfa Romeo 135 was that the US could afford to put in service an engine that required to toss 5 cylinders every 25 hours of functioning.
The RR Merlin had nominally a 240 hours TBO but according to Rolls-Royce, if 30% of engines were reaching overhaul life and, no single cause made-up more than 30% of rejections, then it was time for an increase of maximum engine life.That means that 70% of the RR Merlins didn't even reach TBO, and that was late in the war when, again, much of the time the engine was at cruise speed.
It has Italian style, good looking and interesting.
Brilliant
But then again, Piaggio hung a motorycle engine off to one side. That one didn't vanish into obscurity...
Wasn't it an airplane starter motor?
@@benholroyd5221 As far as i know that's an myth. However, much of the Vespa design used aeronautical thinking rather than following conventional motorcycle practice. Which happens when you ask someone who designed helicopters to come up with a solution.
I like it, something appealing about it.
Would be exciting to remake this plane design using state-of-the-art CAD design and engineering programs!
So to me this just raises the question of ducted fans.
Were these experimented with at this time?
It seems strange to move the engine back, but not also move the prop back, and if you're doing air flow for cooling why not use it for thrust?
Caproni Campini N.1
Also, do a vid about the koolhoven f.k.55; another unique plane.
It certainly looks good!
had a piaggio moped back in the day. should have kept it, havent seen another since.
A really cool aircraft, to bad it didn't go into production, could have been a game changer!
If its crazy but it works is it really crazy? IMHO that design had lots of potential.
The plane was under calibered with 4 italian 12.7mm and one 20 mm much like the P-38 Lightning .
I really wish you would choose metric or statue measurements. The constant repetition I find really impairs my enjoyment of what is otherwise a really excellent series of films.
Shame because If Piaggio continued with this project they probably would have replaced the engine with a turbine..
It looks like a jet and probably would have been transformed .. Maybe a great project for a radio controlled aeroplane.
Thanks for another great video Ed!
I can understand the idea of better streamlining, and more space in the nose for armament that a mid mounted engine can give, but weight distribution? Sure keeping weight down in the extremities (and therefore reducing inertia/momentum) is good "physics" in regard to handling/stability, but at a cost. The P39, I believe, suffered from too much weight rearward, and too much in flight variation in weight distribution, causing stability issues, esp in regard to a spin. Probably a reason not many piston engined planes had mid mounted engines.
Sure the engine is heavy, but it's a constant weight that can be compensated by other means during design (as are weapons) and the Centre of Gravity of the aircraft will remain the same as the weight never changes during operation.
But it displaces other "variable" weight loads (like fuel, ammo, cargo etc) to places away from the C of G. Using fuel as you travel if it's not stored at the C of G will need constant trimming, ammo similarly. To me it's biggest benefit would be the possible streamlining, and getting the heavier weapons out of the wings and into the centerline.
I believe the claims of 400 MPH and 41,000 foot ceiling are both a bit optimistic.
You had me at Piaggio!
Nice video of a type I was completely unaware of, very informative & good visuals, shame you ruined the comentary right at the end by describing it as quite unique!
This plane would've been a great candidate for a set of jaws painted on the air intake.
I’m sure I read about and saw photos of a late WW1 or perhaps post war British aircraft with a propeller midway in the fuselage. No idea of the engine or even the manufacturer (perhaps Sopwith??). If I can find any info I’ll post it here.
Possibly the "pulpit" aircraft?
th-cam.com/video/Bkvh5auBoV0/w-d-xo.html
It have a unique style, not the most beautiful design but it have some charm.
Amazing and wholly new to me. I've been aware of some of the better Italian fighters of the day but this is my first real lesson in what they were doing in prototypes. I had no idea they were this deep into such innovation. Pity- not only the armistice. It feels like even without it, this aircraft would have been an innovation at the tail end of piston fighter development just as the whole concept was fading away. And maybe even dated by 1944. Have this in the air in 1940 or 1941, they'd really have something.
Could have done with swept wings with their spread lift for stability, with all that weight in the centre.
I would like to drink the liquid cooled fluid of this generation's best engines
If I could, I would fund your site! Make more videos
Plodding through them :)
Has probably already been said, but to my mind if a radial can be used to power a tank--completely enclosed--then it should also be possible to do so in an aircraft. It was just an idea that came too late.
Great vid 👍
I've often thought about stall characteristics of the Airacobra or Airabonita. Surely they had terrible problems with flat spin tendencies when the nose doesnt house the center of gravity?
Interesting as the Koolhoven company used a rear mounted engine with 2 counter rotating propellors at the front It seems that Pagio , fokker , koolhoven all where trying in to some form of dual engine or twin prop configurations to get as small and as powerfull an aircraft.
the Koolhoven FK-55 . the mock up looked great . but due to an iseu with engine availability they used a different one and it cooked the pilot . plus it changed the look of the aircraft from a valcon to a fat duck.
The British 'Fairey' company produced pre-war a viable 'two-in-one' "vee" piston-engine, one cylinder-bank of which could be left idle for fuel-economy The powerful engine might have improved the performance of some lackluster planes like the 'Battle' but the politicians squashed further production.
@@None-zc5vg True ,but there was also the Hungarian prototype of a turbo prop engine . Some how it never realy got in to production as every one went on to develop turbines.
This plane should have had the moniker ‘ the Scooter ‘
Moving the engine from the nose to amidships doesn't make an airplane 'better balanced'. It doesn't really matter were the engine is as long as the center of gravity is forward of the aerodynamic center. If you move the heavy engine back you also need to move the wing back to maintain this relationship. It is not better balance, but it is better visibility for the pilot and more room in the nose for armament.
when saying name my ears hurt... otherwise that you for this very unusual aircraft
NIce video
Very good theroy..shame the big horsepower engine never went into it
G'day,
Hmmmn, well, the Yanquis built a lot of Tanks with buried Radial Engines, and the Brit's built the Bristol Brabazon with 10 Radial Engines inside the Wings, as well as a lot of Westland (Sikorsky) Helicopters with Radial Engines lurking under the Tail-Rotor Pitch-Pedals...; so closeted Radials are not quite impossible - merely very difficult and requiring some serious Fans and careful Ducting.
Such is life,
Have a good one...
Stay safe.
;-p
Ciao !
Bit short for you today Warbles! ;D
4 .50 cal mgs and a 20 (or 37) in the nose, plus 2 or 4 .30s in the wings?
That sounds like a hybrid armament between p-38 & p-39/p-400.
It's a P39 Aracobra with a radial engine.
Lack of larger hot air exit vents, it could have been fixed. I think with more time and knowledge, it could have worked. But I don't know if this plane would have been better than the rest.
Me in first 2/3 of video: "These specs sound awesome!" Me hearing them listed as "was to have been fitted": sadness
Beautiful plane . Top spec's for 39' . The Brit's may have dodged a bullet there .
Look at the difficulty of the H-24 Napier Sabre
Piaggio P.108, Piaggio P.119, Campini-Caproni N°1 (or CC2), SAI-Ambrosini SS.4… I still have to decide if I should be sad because the Regia Aeronautica did never develop properly such projects, due to how awesome they were or if I should be glad because the Regia Aeronautica did never develop properly such projects, due to our alliance at the time.
So the same premise as the Bell P-39 Airacobra
Anyone else think the photo at 3:18 looks kinda like an F16 Falcon?
For the number of these stories that involve an engine not being available for purchase or not even in production, and it ends up swapped for something bigger/heavier/less powerful... you'd think that aircraft designers would start drawing blueprints around the dimensions and capabilities of an engine they could actually obtain.
It was a time of rapid change. With the design process taking about 2 years, by the time it got from concept to flying prototype, you might have gone through two generations of engines.
It might have been designed for a 500hp unit, redesigned partway through for a 700hp and by the time it's ready to fly, its competitors are using a 1000hp engine.
@@kieranh2005 Sure, that all makes sense and everything... but (hypothetically) if the 700hp engine is still just a prototype and 500hp is all you can actually get, it puzzles me that they would construct an airframe for a 1000hp engine that's just a blueprint. Not just one plane, but design after design meets this flaw.
The Piaggio P.XV was already a very good 1700hp engine. The only advantage of the P.XXII was that it would have provided that power using standard 87 octane fuel, while the P.XV needed 97 octane.
hmmm interesting, surely they realised, from day one , that cooling the radial was going to be their No 1 issue ?