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Why I couldn't stop looking at the world's first fighter aircraft

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Shiv Aroor
Shiv AroorNov 14, 2016 | 12:33

Why I couldn't stop looking at the world's first fighter aircraft

I couldn't stop looking at it. Nobody should. Nestled almost demurely on the first floor World War I section of Seattle's splendid Museum Of Flight, an institution that evokes gasps of aviatory rapture at every corner is a relic from just over a century ago.

Just a few feet away from glistening, restored modern and vintage aircraft is this one. Ragged, frayed and nobly bent by a hundred years, few vintage aircraft of such staggering importance exist in as much original form as this one does.

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This is the Caproni Ca.20. And it happens to be regarded as the world's first fighter plane.

The timing of my encounter with the Ca.20 couldn't have been more fortuitous. As India prepares to evaluate the formidable qualities of a slew of modern fighters, one of which it hopes to build within the country, it will be looking at capabilities that Giovanni Battista Caproni couldn't possible have dreamed of in 1913 when he began developing the Ca.20.

As I travel the world this month, learning with ever increasing depth what modern fighter aircraft have the capacity to achieve, the Ca.20 stopped me in my tracks in a way that few aircraft ever have.

The aircraft itself is an arresting, silencing sight. Made almost entirely from wood, the Ca.20 has rough cast heavy metal nose section that protects a big wooden propeller. In the metal cowling are perfectly curved intake points for air.

The propeller is turned by a perfectly preserved Le Rhône rotory engine, a little relic in itself. Since the system that allowed machine guns to fire rounds safely through turning propellers during flight hadn't been invented yet, the Ca.20 sported a US designed Lewis machine gun propped up on pole so it could fire over the aircraft's propeller arc.

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A pilot seated below the machine gun in an open cockpit flew the plane with one hand, while operating the Lewis with a trigger line that ran down the hoist pole.

It is an astonishing configuration for a fight, but the Ca.20 was still regarded as being well ahead of its time. Circumstance saw to it that the Ca.20 didn't ever go into production and the one that sits today at Seattle Museum Of Flight, was the only one Caproni ever built.

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Caproni Ca.20 displayed at Seattle Museum Of Flight (Photo credit: Shiv Aroor)

A greater irony for the time couldn't have been known - the Ca.20 performed better than other European aircraft being developed at the time. Caproni, who is known to have believed greatly in his machine, must have resented orders to focus his talents and industry on building Italy a bomber aircraft.

Whatever happened, the Ca.20 never became an operational airplane. The museum in Seattle obtained the sole piece with difficulty in 1999, and had to painstakingly dismantle the priceless plane, stored for 85 years with the Caproni family with several of those decades for some reason at an Italian monastery.

The Seattle Museum Of Flight brilliantly produces audio sound of several of the vintage aircraft's engines, piped through speakers in the ceiling of showcase halls. The effect is incredible.

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Sadly, no recorded sound exists of the world's first fighter plane. Somehow, that doesn't seem to matter. Because when you're standing in front of it, and if you close your eyes for a moment, you can hear it.

An unruly clatter of wood, rising in crescendo into a whining hum, tugging at the hunk of hewn wood behind it. Your mind flashes. You think of the complicated carbon composites that make up the bodies of modern fighters, carefully conjured in laboratories and baked with unmatched care in giant ovens. And then you think of the little Caproni, its body little more than the stuff you'd make a couch with.

Even today, the advancement of aviation is a heady, upward spiral of remarkable achievement every five years or so.

Better data for pilots, faster combat solutions, longer range weaponry, intelligent systems that can save aircraft even if the pilot has blacked out in his seat.

But standing in front of the Ca.20, it is difficult not to imagine the wind in that test pilot's face, his nerves as he revved up in that little fighter, his cheeks pulled back by the wind, his exhilaration.

The Ca.20 is little known, and somehow that's where it wants to be.

Today, it sits in a reverential aura of soft-focus light. A message board out front requests visitors to please not touch it.

Last updated: November 15, 2016 | 15:01
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