I had been warned that there wasn’t much left of the airplane that designer Gianni Caproni had intended to be a transatlantic flying boat—the Noviplano—which had crashed and broken apart concluding its first and final flight, on March 4, 1921. There wasn’t. I’d trekked up into the Italian Alps to the Caproni museum in Trento only to learn that a small section of the hull and other pieces from the wreck of the Noviplano were in storage, awaiting conservation. Next I took the train to the Volandia Museum of Flight, just outside the perimeter fence of Milan’s Malpensa international airport. I was ushered inside to meet Gregory Alegi, a Yale-educated Italian journalist, defense analyst, and aviation historian. Alegi led me to the Noviplano relic display on the far side of the industrial campus of historic workshops and hangars that had grown up around Caproni’s original 1910 shack.
Now a museum park, Volandia still has the funeral chapel Caproni built during the Great War for unlucky student pilots. As billed, the Noviplano relics were sparse—a fuselage bracket here, a wing strut brace there. All had been fished from Lake Maggiore, sadly the only body of water the gigantic seaplane ever launched from or landed in—hard.
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