Alessandro Guidoni

Alessandro Guidoni (born July 15, 1880 in Turin , † April 27, 1928 in Montecelio ) was an Italian aviation pioneer and general . The city ​​of Guidonia Montecelio near Rome was named after him.

Life

Brigadier General Alessandro Guidoni

After completing school in his hometown of Turin, Guidoni completed an engineering degree at the local technical college in 1903 . The Italian Navy then took him on as a first lieutenant at sea in their engineering corps. In 1905 he obtained another degree in shipbuilding in Genoa . In 1909 he began to construct aircraft and worked with the naval aviator Mario Calderara , among others . During the Italo-Turkish War he obtained a flight license in North Africa . In 1912 and 1913 he was in charge of the Navy's aircraft yard in Venice , and in 1914 he took over the one in Taranto , where he was entrusted with the planning of the aircraft mother ships Europa and Elba . In 1916 he returned to Venice and began there with tests in which the resistance of ships to bombs , grenades , sea ​​mines and torpedoes was tested. Together with Gaetano Arturo Crocco he developed the first gyro-controlled bomb that could be used by airplanes or airships against targets up to 20 km away. In 1918 he led a Aviation - research institution in Rome.

After the First World War he took part in the drafting of an international aviation agreement as a representative of the Italian air force in Paris and was also a member of the inter-allied aviation control commission in Berlin . From 1920 to 1923 he served as the Italian aviation attaché in London , where he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society because of his technical achievements . In 1923, Guidoni became the first head of the engineering corps of the Italian Air Force, which had just been set up as an independent military service .

In 1928, Guidoni was working on the development of a new parachute that the 47-year-old brigadier general wanted to test personally. During the attempts at the airfield of Montecelio near Rome, he was killed because the parachute failed.

Military airfield

The Montecelio airfield, created in 1915, developed under Guidoni into a center for the development of aviation technology. From 1935 Mussolini set up a large military complex there ( Città dell'Aria ) and named it Guidonia in honor of the aviation pioneer who died. Later the suburb of Rome called Guidonia Montecelio developed from here. The military installations and the airfield were destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943. After the Second World War, military command, administrative and training facilities remained on the Guidonia military airfield , while the traditional flight test center moved to the Pratica di Mare military airfield .

Web links

• Biography. (PDF) Ministero della Difesa, accessed on February 17, 2019 (Italian). 
• Distance weapons timeline ( Memento from May 24, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.69 MB, English)