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Ansaldo A.1 Balilla (Hunter)

1918 WORLD WAR 1

History

Ansaldo A 1 Ballilla ("Fighter") was the first fighter of Italian origin. When the First World War (1914-1918) began, the Italian armed forces had been relying on French-designed fighter jets, prompting the local Italian company Ansaldo to design, develop and produce the "A.1" fighter biplane.

The resulting aircraft offered excellent performance in the air (one of the fastest biplanes of its time), but its reported handling qualities were questionable, making the machine unpopular with pilots. The A.1, known as the "Hunter", appeared in the final stages of World War I, which helped limit its availability and subsequent use - Italy became its only major operator, as no better existed . However, some stocks found their war in the hands of Americans who were converted into air racers and carried Curtiss D-12 engines (American WWI ace Eddie Rickenbacker created the aircraft in 1920) National Airspeed Record).

The Ansaldo A.1 Ballilla is considered a basic biplane fighter design based on the underwing main aircraft configuration. The desire is to install in parallel on each member. The lower part hit the lower part of the fuselage and the upper part hung above the plane. The engine is nose-mounted as usual, but its oversized nature means forward visibility is severely limited. This engine usually drives a multi-blade wooden propeller.

The pilot sits in an open-air cockpit amidships, with the fuselage tapering to the rear. The empennage consists of a vertical fin and a low horizontal plane. The landing gear consisted of two main wheeled landing gear elements under the front mass of the aircraft and a simple tail skid.

Power comes from a water-cooled SPA 6A inline piston engine that produces 220 hp and drives a four-bladed propeller. The platform has a flight time of 1 hour and 30 minutes and can reach speeds of nearly 140 miles per hour.

The service ceiling is a useful 16,400 feet, and the plane gets there at 520 feet per minute. The range is 410 miles.

Like typical fighters of the period, the Balilla carried the usual armament, a 2 x 7.7mm (UK) Vickers machine gun mounted on a fixed forward-firing mount on the nose. These are fired synchronously by rotating propeller blades.

In addition to Corp Aeronautico Militare (Italian Air Force), operators include Argentina, Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Mexico, Poland, the USSR and Uruguay. A total of 307 units were produced, of which 250 were produced by Ansaldo under a local license and 57 were produced in Lublin, Poland.

The Polish models were a post-World War I initiative, started in 1919, but these models came too late to be used in the Russo-Polish war of 1919-1921. In 1920, the same aircraft were also contracted by the Russians, but these aircraft were not available in quantities until April 1922, and did not enter service until mid-1928.