Re: Did The Italians Do Anything Right??

"Louis C" <louisc00@xxxxxxxxx> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:1020872f-c78d-4cbc-b660-fa447583640e@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Michele wrote:

Another industrial issue, separate from that of quality, is that of
standardization. While quality problems affected things like tanks,
vehicles, guns etc., standardization was a problem for the aircraft
industry.

Note that this is a problem with the armed forces, not the aircraft
industry. If the Regio Aeronautica was prepared to order 30 aircraft
of sub-variant A and 100 more of sub-variant B rather than freeze
design work and get everybody working on the same product, then it
only had itself to blame for that.

Yes, well, there was a jungle of governmental and military offices charged
with parts of the procurement process, and when getting poor equipment, the
armed forces tended to blame either civilian meddling or generals who were
also "businessmen", or both. So I agree it was not a problem with the
industry; but some would say it was to a greater extent caused by the
political system and its effects within the armed forces, than by the armed
forces themselves.


Had the Italian government ordered a smaller number of
models, some of the smaller companies, which were indeed unable to churn
out
serious numbers, would have been forced to fold, and the larger ones
would
have been forced to buy them out and to produce their own model there.

They wouldn't have been forced to buy them out, the smaller companies
would simply have been sort of requisitioned and done sub-contracting
work on the larger companies' designs. See how a given type of plane
was assembled by different manufacturers in every other country.


Yes, I did not express the concept properly.

National industries, finally, were favored over foreign ones. This
happened
and happens everywhere, but it was particularly bad in Italy.

What was particularly bad in Italy was the state of national design.
Italians were (and still are, for that matter) very good at designing
cool-looking stuff, but the WWII Italians seem to have just been
unable to design a proper engine.


Well, generally so, but with the notice that cool-looking isn't useless
specifically when it comes to airframes; we tend to associate cool with
sleek, and sleek means less air drag.

As the facts
proved, the Italian aircraft industry could have either bought German
engines, or built them under license, or both, and that would have been
good
for the aircraft delivered to the Aeronautica. But it would have cut the
profits of the industry.

Note that all the "Italian" aircraft engines were in fact licence-
built copies of foreign designs.


I was thinking about the switch from radial engines to in-line ones. I'll
admit I thought some of the radial engines weren't license-built.

.

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