Mario Calderara
Mario Calderara (born October 10, 1879 in Verona , † August 10, 1944 ) was an Italian naval officer and aviation pioneer.
Calderara was born the son of an Alpini general. From 1898 to 1901 he attended the Naval Academy in Livorno . Fascinated by flying, Calderara started experimenting with simple gliders in 1903. In 1905 he wrote to the Wright brothers . With the support of the Italian Navy , he constructed biplanes in La Spezia in 1906 , which were pulled over the water by a motorized boat. In 1907 he crashed on a test flight and was seriously injured. In 1908 he switched to the French aircraft manufacturer Gabriel Voisin in Paris as a draftsman . In 1909 he built his own powered airplane, with which he completed his first successful flight (in France).
In 1909 he took the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio on a sightseeing flight as a pilot at an air show in Brescia (made famous through Franz Kafka's report Die Airplane in Brescia ) . For his success there he received the Italian license number "1". In 1911 he designed a seaplane.
During the First World War he served on board various warships. From 1917 he was entrusted by the naval management with the command of a pilot school on Lake Bolsena . Here he mainly trained American pilots on seaplanes. From 1923 to 1925 he was an aviation attaché at the Italian embassy in Washington. He then became a businessman and settled in Paris as a representative of US aircraft companies. At the beginning of the Second World War, however, he was expropriated there and had to leave the country.
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- Biography (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Caldera, Mario |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian aviation pioneer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 10, 1879 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Verona |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 10, 1944 |