Fiat G.55 - Italy's Centaur of WW2

right welcome back to the Mozilla story coke aeronautica militare he had like the channel in Italy today we are going to have a look at the Fiat g55 which is essentially a mid to late or design of the Italian Air Force now there's really free aircraft that are important for the time frame that we are looking at and that is that via 355 the Reggiana our e200 5 and the makisi 205 now on the internet will find extremely passionate discussions which one of these three aircraft was is that in fact the best and this is a good discussion we want to be going into today but I will make some points for the theory 55 which might give you an idea of why I want to look at this particular aircraft now all of these free aircraft the Mackey Fiat and the reggiani used a licen produced time event 6:05 engine previously the Italians had these 601 which they used with the ABC - OH - but now the Germans actually gave them the more powerful time event six five now the theory 55 was designed by two epic Abigail and essentially what he did is he simply took the Fiat 850 and placed a DB 605 in there and he had the G 55 now the Italians decided to adopt quite a unique little armament with this aircraft first of all it would have a 20-millimeter cannon firing through the prop spinner and then they wanted to place to greater 12.7 machine guns at the top part of the engine cowling and to in the bottom part of the engine county now they had some problems with the ones on the bottom so they in fact referred back to the wings and placed weapons there however this weapon load out of 120 millimeter cannon which was a german mg 1 5 1 - 20 and for greater than 7 humans didn't really have that much appeal to the Italian Air Force at that point in time they needed something to have a little bit more punch so they decided to change the weapon loadout to 320 millimeter cannons and to breed a machine guns which were still mounted in the top engine cowling when the Italians were presented with these three different designs that is the Fiat the Mackie and the reggiani they essentially made a comparison test between his aircraft and they concluded that overall the Fiat was probably the best one now in terms of performance it probably wasn't as good as their a Gianni however when militaries and nations especially in world war ii look at what kind of weapons they want to adopt going forward they also looked into things like how can we produce these weapons how fast can be referred our production hood from our old aircraft to the new ones have complicated visit and what is the longevity of the design and here the fear g55 was simply better than the competition that allows the Maquis and the reggiani of the santero as the Fiat was also known was finally the aircraft that the Italians hoped that would give them an edge over the increasing number of Allied bombers that were coming into the airspace with a powerful armament this aircraft was finally able to clone those a 17 and 20 force however even though they concluded that this aircraft is probably the better one from all those three designs they still ordered three of them and the Fiat got a first order of 1,800 machines which was already pretty enthusiastic and probably a little bit too optimistic and that order was then increased to 2,400 now by the time that Italy signed the armistice we're still in 1943 here only 33 odds have actually been built so that is you can see here the issue of the production figures the actual production figures and what they had envisioned now when the Italy signed the armistice the factory that was producing the fields was in the northern part of Italy so it essentially fell on to access control and production was continued and quite a few squadrons when in fact issued is Fiats and pilots from what we know reading we they like them and this is for good reason the Fiat g55 was able to take down bombers and it was also able to effectively engage any analyte find her that might escort these bombers or that might be on a free hunt so these plans really were powerful and for each in the hands of the confident pilot now ste Fiat g55 are still in production the Germans started to have an interest in the aircraft and they themselves flew over a focal 419 Anton and a bf109 G for fly comparison flights against the Fiat the Maquis and reggiani and they asked the Italians that concluded that the Fiat was probably the best out of the three again the Reggiana was probably better for performance wise but it was so complicated to produce that even the Germans shy it from giving it a girl now when the Germans looked at the fire chief 55 they didn't you see a potent machine for 1943 but they saw a protein machine going forward the diamond bands engine the six of five that was already mounted in the machine was a good engine it was powerful but it wasn't powerful enough in a couple of years so the Germans fought about mounting a dime event six of three engines to the aircraft and increase its performance in the long run now this engine was already in development Jeremy they already had a couple of those however the beer fall amounts couldn't mount the engine simply because it was too big the Fiats structure and design did allow for this kind of upgrade so the Germans were exceptionally interested in time to get a production run of this aircraft to Germany this also was after the Armistice the armistice had no real influence on the interest of the Germans had in this machine because the production was of course in the northern part of Italy which was still controlled by the Germans now there was only one little problem with this plan when the Germans took production of the p55 in Italy they saw that one p55 was produced every 15,000 hours now Italians and their industrial capacity wasn't that of Germany's Germany had a bigger and better production quality and efficiency than Italy so the Germans did some math and they concluded that with capable workers and a solid production one they could turn out one of these machines every 9,000 hours which is already better than the Italians but it's simply not as good as what they can do with the before mines at this point the Germans were turning out at the affor online every 5000 hours so essentially in the same timeframe you could get to bf 109s for every one g55 and at that point you add a performance and the added bonuses of the t-55 were simply no longer that great for the Germans to actually think about changing the production run also this presents you with an exceptional good counter-argument if you're ever been told that the Germans always put quality through in front of quantity because at this point in time they obviously preferred quantity than quality now one of the things humans sometimes run into when you look at the field p55 is that it was planned to carry a torpedo now this was of course at a point in time when the Spadaro the aircraft that we had in a previous episode which you can find something here was really suffering under the strain of the missions that it was supposed to do and with the santero there was a plan to put a pedo on the aircraft and essentially give the Italians a platform that had speeds and essentially could defend itself against Allied fighters at the same time while carrying a torpedoes which would essentially give them a edge against Allied shipping in the Mediterranean however this was of course a complicated procedure first Thea decided to design a new aircraft outright you will sometimes see it mentioned at this g-57 very quickly they abandoned the plan and decided to use the g55 as the platform now a few redesigns had to be made first of all the centreline radiator the decency on the aircraft obviously prevented the mounting of torpedo so what they did is associated the German idea which we see on the via 4r9 where radiators in each way and in the same thing they took that radiator split it in half place one on each wing this allowed them to mount a torpedo that could effectively engage Allied shipping the only problem here is we are by now in 1945 so the idea essentially is in that year only and nothing comes from it it's simply too late I would Italian pilots that got their hands on the CRT 55s really liked them and when I say really we like them I need really people like them however they were never enough to go around by the end of World War two not even free on earth these aircraft that we had built and a lot of discordance and pilots that initially used the aircraft essentially had to fall back on German beef 109s because they simply couldn't deliver these aircraft fast enough now I hope you that you enjoyed this look at the theory 55 and that you learned something from the video I want to thank the Museu storico analytical militaria here in italy for essentially maintain the such a great great collection of aircraft and if you have her happen to be in a neighborhood give this museum ago it is at the point of this video actually free entrance so now if you do enjoy what I do and want to see more of this kind of content please consider checking out by page one support of a patron allows me to make these kind of videos and invest more and more time into my research and planning of the channel and it really goes a long way in helping me maintain kind of content that you guys like to watch now if you want to see more from the collection of the museum check out this video on the SF 79 Italy's primary bomber and torpedo bomber of war - or this video on the MC 72 which is essentially the fastest plane ever built and I mean ever so as always have a great day good hunting and see you in the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 216,950

Rating: 4.9460616 out of 5

Keywords: WW2, Aviation, Education, G.55, Fiat, Action, horsepower, engine, German, engineering, history, speed, fast, Mediterranean, design, Italian, Italy

Id: aDxQ1BhB2kw

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017