The Piaggio P.119; A Fighter with A Unique Engine Set Up 

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..

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...

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.

Caproni Campini N.1

You'd want some armour for the pilot anyway though. And there's an upper limit to the g forces a human can sustain anyway. Plus there's more opportunity for crumple zones etc. So in practice would this actually be an issue?

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!

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 .

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

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

Thanks!

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.

Nice.

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)

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.

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.

Yes, but it would have looked so elegant while doing so!

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.

Look at the Bartini Beriev VVA-14.

C 202? C 205? Re 2005? G55?

Bit short for you today Warbles! ;D

Apologies, I didnt make it clear. Both proposed engines were radials.

Possibly the "pulpit" aircraft? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Bkvh5auBoV0.html

I have flown the AT-33, which was exactly that.

Plodding through them :)

Oh yes, a pusher radial. That had been played with a bit before, but certainly a novel idea. I'll get around to the J7 one day.

@@EdNashsMilitaryMatters the air frame was actually designed so that it could be upgraded to take a jet engine. You could almost think of the radial engine as being an interim solution