Premium Vehicles | G.55 Silurante

Aside from the Italian Air Force, numerically inferior only to that of the Soviet, Italy also possessed a very strong navy. However, it had no aircraft carrier at all, its air force had to protect the ships from airfields on the shore. But the war highlighted the impracticality of these doctrine with the navy fallen victim to attacks from allied aircraft more and more often with no air cover to speak of. So, in 1942, a special program was launched to build aircraft carriers with particular urgency. This meant that multi-purpose sea-based aircraft capable of carrying torpedoes also had to be built. Developing such vehicle from scratch would be an expensive and lengthy undertaking so the leading fighter of the time was used as the base model, the Fiat G.55. But in 1943, because of the Italy surrender, work on modernizing the fighter was stopped. It was restarted only in 1944, by the behest of ANR, the designers sacrificed the high-caliber frontal machine guns for the sake of a torpedo rack mounted under the fuselage which could carry a 987-kilogram torpedo. The aircraft was christened the G.55 "Silurante".

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