While two ground crew men bustling about a compressor, likely used for the start of the fighter’s engine, an Italian Air Force’s fighter pilot going to taxying for takeoff. Note the elevator “all to pitch”. The aircraft is a Macchi MC.202 “Folgore” (Lightning) of the 4th Stormo “Francesco Baracca”, 90th Squadriglia, a famous Italian fighter unit during WW2 (still existing as 4th Stormo “Duca d’Aosta” with Eurofighter Typhoon at Grosseto Air Base). The plane has the “African camouflage”, but likely this photo was taken in Italy (Sicily?) on 1942. Victor Sierra

Ready to taxying

Macchi MC.202 “Folgore” of the Italian Regia Aeronautica’s 22° Gruppo Caccia (22nd Fighter Group), commissioned for the Naples defence, in flight in the face of the Vesuvius, Summer 1943. Victor Sierra

In face to Vesuvius

A 4th Stormo Italian Air Force’s Macchi MC.202 returned to his base, likely in Sicily after a mission over Malta, without the right half horizontal plane detached after a sharp recovery from a high speed dive: an event experienced by some MC.202’s pilots during the first fighting with this aircraft more performing of the Fiat G.50 and the MC.200. At first this event was attributed to a structural “weakness” of the tail plan which was strengthened, but this phenomenon continued to repeat yourself and the pilots, in the main by intuition, learned to “pace the controls”, in particular the stick, during certain manoeuvers as the recovery from an unusual asset or from a sharp high speed dive. In reality the Italian pilots experienced a series of aerodynamic phenomenon to them still unknown (but also to may Italian aircraft designers) as the compressibility and the flutter. A great and dramatic problem of the Italian aviation during the years immediately before and during the war was the gap between the theoretic experience elaborated in research centers as Guidonia and their transfer to the practice. In other words the knowledge today within of a Sunday aviator’s reach at this time were in good part unknown by the Italian military pilots. Victor Sierra