Reggiane Re.2000 Falco

Officine Meccaniche Reggiane of Reggio Emilia had built railway rolling stock and other manufacturers’ aircraft under licence before it decided to design a fighter of its own. Absorbed into the Caproni group in the mid-1930s, it had the industrial capacity for the job and no track record in the field. The man it put in charge was Roberto Longhi, an engineer who had spent years working in the United States and came home with American ideas about stressed-skin construction and wing design — ideas visible at a glance in the machine he produced.

The Re.2000 Falco was first flown in May 1939 with Longhi and Antonio Alessio responsible for the design. To Italian eyes it looked foreign: an all-metal low-wing monoplane with a broad elliptical wing, a retractable undercarriage and a barrel-chested radial cowling, closer in appearance to contemporary American fighters than to anything else then flying in Italy. It was also, measured against a Regia Aeronautica whose front line still contained hundreds of biplanes, genuinely modern — and it was the first fighter its maker had ever designed.

The wing was the aircraft. Built around five spars rather than the usual one or two, it was immensely strong and gave the Falco a turn that impressed every pilot who tried it. Longhi then used the space between those spars as integral fuel tanks — the wing structure itself holding the petrol, with no separate cells or bags. The arrangement saved weight and internal volume and gave the aircraft a range of roughly 950 km, well beyond what Italian fighters of the period normally managed.

Power came from the Piaggio P.XI R.C.40, a 14-cylinder radial derived from the French Gnome-Rhône 14K and rated at about 985 hp, driving the Falco to some 530 km/h with a ceiling near 10,500 m. Armament followed Italian practice and Italian conservatism: two 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT machine guns in the cowling, synchronised through the propeller arc. Two heavy machine guns were a reasonable battery against another fighter in 1939 and a thin one against anything larger — a weakness the whole Reggiane line would carry.

In the evaluations of 1939–40 the Falco flew against the Macchi C.200, and pilots came away impressed by its handling, its climb and its turn. The Regia Aeronautica ordered the Macchi anyway. The stated objection was not performance but the wing: unprotected fuel held inside the primary structure was judged a fire risk in combat, since a single incendiary round anywhere in the wing would find petrol. Doubts about the Piaggio radial’s reliability counted too, and so, in all probability, did industrial politics — Macchi was an established fighter house, Reggiane was not.

The arithmetic that followed shows the size of the decision. Something over 1,100 C.200s were built; Reggiane completed roughly 170 Falcos, most of them for foreign customers. Italy’s most modern-looking fighter of 1939 was released for export while the air force that had tested it standardised on something else — a defensible choice for an industry that could not comfortably run two fighter programmes at once, and an expensive one for the pilots who spent 1940 and 1941 flying the aircraft it chose.

Sweden was rearming in a hurry and running out of suppliers. American deliveries — the aircraft that were to have become its J 9 and J 10 fighters — were blocked by the United States embargo of 1940, and with Germany at the Baltic’s southern shore the Swedish air force bought where it still could: Italy. It ordered 60 Falcos, which entered service as the J 20.

They equipped F 10 at Ängelholm in the far south of the country and spent the war on the least glamorous and most demanding duty a neutral air force has: patrolling a frontier that both belligerents crossed at will, intercepting aircraft that were often lost, sometimes hostile and always someone else’s. Swedish pilots liked the Falco’s handling and disliked its two-gun armament and its engine’s appetite for maintenance. The J 20 stayed in front-line service until 1945 — the longest operational career the type had anywhere.

Hungary took the Falco furthest. Seventy Italian-built machines were delivered from December 1939 and re-engined at MÁVAG with the Hungarian WM K-14 radial of about 1,000 hp to become the Héja I — “Hawk”. A manufacturing licence followed, and MÁVAG built the adapted Héja II in its own right: reportedly 98 aircraft in 1943 and 72 more in 1944, so that rather more Falcos were completed in Hungary than in Italy.

Hungarian Héjas flew on the Eastern Front from 1942 with the 1/1 Fighter Squadron, which recorded at least 17 confirmed victories — among them four LaGG-3s and three Il-2s. It was the wrong year to arrive with a two-gun fighter designed in 1939: against the Soviet types of 1942–43 the Héja had no margin in speed, firepower or protection, and the attrition of the Stalingrad winter settled the argument. It was pulled back to home defence and training as Bf 109s replaced it, the same substitution happening across every minor Axis air force.

Italy had battleships and no aircraft carrier, and the Falco’s unusual range suggested a use for it. Twelve aircraft were converted as the Catapultabile — strengthened for catapult launch from the fleet’s capital ships, giving a navy with no air cover of its own a single-shot interceptor it could put into the air at sea. What it could not do was recover them: the pilot flew to a land base or ditched.

On 8 September 1943, the day of the armistice, six were still in service — two aboard the Roma and one each on the Vittorio Veneto and the Italia, the renamed Littorio. They were the only fighters the Italian fleet had with it when it sailed for Malta and the Roma was sunk. Ashore, the Falco’s Italian career had been just as small: the 377ª Squadriglia Autonoma flew them from Trapani-Milo in Sicily from October 1941 and from Pantelleria at the end of 1942, before the survivors were relegated to test duties.

Reggiane completed about 170 Falcos, the majority for export, and Hungary licence-built roughly 200 more as the Héja — an Italian fighter whose war was fought almost entirely in other countries’ markings, over the Baltic and the Don rather than the Mediterranean. The rejection at home was not obviously wrong. The integral tanks were a real vulnerability rather than an imagined one, and standardising on the C.200 kept a strained industry to one fighter line at the moment it mattered.

What the Falco bought its maker was a future. The airframe became the basis of the Re.2001 with the German DB 601, the radial-engined Re.2002 fighter-bomber and the DB 605-powered Re.2005 — the line that produced some of the best Italian fighters of the war, all of them built on the wing Longhi drew in 1938. The Re.2000 itself never received the engine or the armament that its airframe deserved, and it went to war for everyone except the air force it had been designed for.

• Sergio Govi, I caccia Reggiane 2000-2001-2002-2005 (Giorgio Apostolo Editore).
• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).
• György Punka, Hungarian Aces of World War 2 (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces 50).