Alfa Aero

[JHertzman@xxxxxxx]

Picking up on Fred's mention of Alfa aircraft engines, Kevin in Utah mentioned
the Alfa-engined WWII fighter in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

A.L.F.A. came into being on January 1 1910, and just ten and a half months
later a Santoni-Franchini biplano powered by an A.L.F.A. engine (one of the
first) took its first flight; while the airplane itself was not an A.L.F.A.,
it was built in a spare room at the factory by Antonio Santoni, a colleague of
Merosi's, and Nino Franchini, who was a test and later racing driver for
A.L.F.A. I do not have at hand the exact introduction date of the car, but
Fusi gives it "autumn" as the date for the prototype. Some discrepancies here,
Fusi gives the January 1 1910 date and production for the year of ten cars,
d'Amico Tabucchi gives June as the month and 50 as the number. Either way,
A.L.F.A. was in the air almost as soon as it was on the road.

Alfa Romeo's second aircraft engine experiment mentioned in Fusi was with a
blown 6C 1750 engine in a Caproni airplane in 1930. While the cylinder block
was in cast iron and the crankcase, as usual, in light alloy the cylinder head
was in aluminum, which I believe was the first for Alfa.

After that things get a little murky, probably partly because car guys want to
emphasize Alfa Romeo as a car company while for important periods it was an
aircraft engine company first, a truckbuilder second, and only peripherally a
builder of a few cars for high-visibility competition and international
bragging rights. The low years of car production (ten in 1936, 42 in 1939, 91
in 1935) are often cited as the company being in hard times, but only about
ten percent of the employees were engaged in building cars. 

Car Guys write of Gioacchino Columbo purely as a car guy, first hired by Alfa
in 1924 as an engineering draftsman, and I do not have Columbo's
autobiography. Aircraft engine historians cite the Colombo S-53 four of 1928
and S-64 6 of 1930 as Italy's first and most popular air-cooled inline engine,
manufactured by Alfa Romeo after 1931. The same source says Alfa started work
on large radials at the government's request in 1927 but accomplished little
until 1935 when it built the 125 R/C based on the Bristol Pegasus and,
slightly later, the 135 R/C based on a Gnome-Rhone engine which in turn was
based on another Bristol design. They also built some Armstrong-Siddeley
engines under license, and a few small radials entirely of their own design.
One large radial which was too late to get into production before the tides of
war changed was a liquid cooled radial engine, the AR1101 of Wifredo Ricart,
with seven banks of four cylinders each; it developed 2,000 hp on the bench
and was expected to produce 2,500 in a later turbocharged version which never
got built, a fate shared by a projected forty-two cylinder version with seven
banks of six cylinders each. 

The summing-up was that apart from such grandiloquent stillborns the Italians
(not just Alfa) generally did a first-class job of making minor improvements
on other people's designs, ending with excellent aircraft which were hampered
by inadequate power, resulting largely from the government having bitten off
much more than it could chew in trying to become a major power comparable to
Nazi Germany. Thank goodness for small blessings.

John H. 

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