Italy’s Bizarre Flying Barrel | The Stipa Caproni [Aircraft Overview #55]

The first 100 people to download Endel by clicking the link below will get a free week of audio experiences! app.adjust.com/b8wxub6?campaign=rexshangar_may&adg… F.A.Q Section Q: Do you take aircraft requests? A: I have a list of aircraft I plan to cover, but feel free to add to it with suggestions:) Q: Why do you use imperial measurements for some videos, and metric for others? A: I do this based on country of manufacture. Imperial measurements for Britain and the U.S, metric for the rest of the world, but I include text in my videos that convert it for both. Q: Will you include video footage in your videos, or just photos? A: Video footage is very expensive to licence, if I can find footage in the public domain I will try to use it, but a lot of it is hoarded by licencing studies (British Pathe, Periscope films etc). In the future I may be able to afford clips :) Q: Why do you sometimes feature images/screenshots from flight simulators? A: Sometimes there are not a lot of photos available for certain aircraft, so I substitute this with digital images that are as accurate as possible. Feel free to leave you questions below - I may not be able to answer all of them, but I will keep my eyes open :)

You don't need to do wind tunnel testing when your plane is a wind tunnel

It appears to be the aircraft that destroyed enemy aircraft by eating them.

It pioneered both the Jet engine principles and Vectored thrust. Nice.

"Italy's weirdest plane" in the thumbnail. OK, you've set a high bar.

The early days of aviation must have been an incredible time to be an engineer when all manner of crazy, radical downright wacky and outlandish designs were built and tested. Today anything too radical or crazy would never get funding

After all, it's a ducted fan. Great for the time and today we know, almost anything flies with this propulsion. Superman, a witch, a magic carpet... Why not, a cartoon plane? Thanks for the video!

‘’Courage taught me no matter how bad a crisis gets ... any sound investment will eventually pay off."

the design isn’t far off from how jet engines work as IIRRC fanjets work the same way. his idea was an unintentional step towards the jet age, a decade before the rise of jet engines

"Caproni's wierd aircraft design bingo card" is something I didn't know I needed.

Dear Rex, I appreciate all your work and expecially that about Italian "air oddities". Your pronunciation of Italian is pretty good and I'd like to give just an advice. As you may probably know, Italian has pretty stringent rules of pronunciation and here are some of them: C and G are "hard" before vowels A, U and O (like in "car" or "gun") while they're "soft" before I and E (like in "jet" or "cheese"). If you want to make them the other way round you must interpose another specific letter. Therefore, C and G become "soft" before A, U and O by interposing an I. So, when you say "Giovanni", you must NOT make the I heard, for it just serves as a "softener", thus you should pronunciate it like "Jovanni". Same (kind of) story if you want to have "hard" C and G before E and I: you must add an H in between. Therefore, Italian "chi" is like English "ki". I understand this is harder to remember for it looks the other way round in English. Keep on the good work and ciao (pronounce as "chao", not "chiao") ;-)

Another Well Done Episode …Imagine trying to calculate the aerodynamics with a pencil and a slide rule …Ducted Fans are still under development.. so this was way ahead of it’s time

What a unique project - and pretty ahead of its time design-wise. It looks like it was delivered to Wile.E.Coyote in kit form in a wooden crate with ACME stenciled on the side...😉

I came across this aircraft in a book I owned 15 years ago. I showed the picture of it to one of my bosses. He scanned it in and did a little color photo editing to it. Making it look like a flying Pepsi can.

Love the cartoonish look of the plane! It's like love at first sight!

I like to see the different prototypes and types of aircraft made by the Caproni company , and how they have found a place in history . Thanks for this well documented video.

I think that with some proper development the design could have been drastically improved. It's a ducted fan, and as we now know with R/C models ducted fans can boast serious performance over conventional propeller driven designs.

Always a good day when Rex uploads

Can we please appreciate how absolutely stunningly eye-pleasing the N.1 is?

Thanks for posting this, I never knew it existed, but it makes a lot of sense despite its odd appearance. Most people don't realize that a large portion of modern jet engine success derives from the shape of the intake and exhaust ducting. A lot of engineering goes into getting the shape correct to feed the air through as engines these days are all about the fan on the front. The engine itself exists to drive that fan and control its speed. Stipa undoubtedly aided this work with his ducted fan research.