On 15 April 1936, Italian cinema audiences were shown an aircraft that appeared to be flying backwards. Giornale Luce B0866 introduced it as “a novelty in the field of heavier-than-air flight”: the motoveleggiatore, a powered glider designed and built by a young captain of the Genio Aeronautico, the engineer Sergio Stefanutti. The machine on the screen was the SS.2 — Sergio Stefanutti number two — and it was the first Italian aircraft conceived and flown in the configuration engineers call the canard. The formula would follow Stefanutti for the rest of his career, and the career ran long: from this 15-horsepower experiment to the first Italian jet past the sound barrier.
An aeroplane the wrong way round
Everything about the SS.2 sat at the opposite end from where a 1936 audience expected it. The wings stood at the back of the fuselage, carrying the rudders. The elevator sat on the prow. The engine was mounted at the stern, pushing instead of pulling. The narrator walks through each inversion with visible enjoyment, and saves the best for the ground: a steerable nose wheel linked to the rudder controls, “which allows the machine to move about on the ground like an ordinary motor car”.
The layout was not showmanship. With the small tail surfaces out front, the pilot sat ahead of the wing with nothing to block the view. The newsreel makes the two claims that mattered to a military audience: maximum visibility, and a nose sector free for armament. It also insists, at length, on safety — the geometry made dangerous attitudes hard to reach, and a nose-over on rough ground was “absolutely impossible”. Every aircraft of the period nosed over sooner or later. Here was one that could not.
Built at Guidonia, flown on a motorcycle engine
Behind the newsreel’s enthusiasm sat a serious institution. The SS.2 was built at the Stabilimento di Costruzioni Aeronautiche of the Direzione Superiore Studi ed Esperienze at Guidonia, the experimental centre of the Regia Aeronautica, and it had first flown in 1935. It was a technological demonstrator, not an operational prototype: a proof that the formula worked. The narrator credits it with a motorcycle engine of “barely 15 horsepower”; technical records say 16. Either way, the margin is the point — the aircraft flew, turned and landed on the power of a small motorbike.
The Luce cameras were at Guidonia because technical novelty made good propaganda. That is worth saying plainly. It is also worth saying that the engineering was real, and the film is now the best record of it: the SS.2 taxiing on its three wheels, the forward elevator working, the takeoff the narrator describes as automatic.
On film, 1936
The newsreel below is Giornale Luce B0866, released 15 April 1936: the SS.2 at speed on the runway, the pilot boarding, the rudders and the prow elevator exercised for the camera, the nose wheel steering, then takeoff, flight and landing.
Source: Archivio Storico Luce, Giornale Luce B0866 (15 April 1936) — archivioluce.com.
From the SS.2 to the sound barrier
Stefanutti was twenty-nine when the newsreel ran. Born in Udine in 1906, he had taken a degree in industrial mechanical engineering in Padua in 1929, a second one in aeronautical engineering in Rome in 1931, and entered the Regia Aeronautica the same year as an officer of the Genio Aeronautico. The SS.2 was where his ideas first flew. A two-seat SS.3 followed, and in 1938–39 the formula grew teeth at SAI Ambrosini as the SS.4, Italy’s first canard fighter — a machine that never reached production but is recognised today as a forerunner of the modern canard combat aircraft.
The rest of the story leaves the canard and keeps the ambition. After the war Stefanutti designed the Sagittario line: on 4 December 1956 the Sagittario 2 became the first Italian jet to pass the sound barrier. He died in Rome in 1992. The configuration he tested on a motorcycle engine at Guidonia now flies on front-line fighters across Europe — small surfaces forward, wing aft, exactly the arrangement a Luce narrator once had to explain to Italy one rudder at a time.
The date the archive remembers it by is 15 April. Each year it comes around, the SS.2 makes its two-minute flight again.
Sources
- Associazione Arma Aeronautica — Sezione di Udine, L’Ing. Sergio Stefanutti, un grande progettista — assoaeronauticaud.it
- Archivio Storico Luce, Giornale Luce B0866, 15 April 1936 — archivioluce.com
- T. Brinati, U. Fischetti, S. Stefanutti, L’uomo e l’aria — L’aeronautica, vol. 2, Vallardi 1939 (photographs, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
