There are machines that become famous because they work perfectly. Others become famous because they win wars, races or records. And then, every so often, there is a machine that becomes unforgettable precisely because it fails. Not because it was foolish, not because the men who created it lacked ability, but because somebody had the courage to attempt something so far ahead of its time that reality simply could not keep up. The Caproni Ca.60 Transaereo was one of those machines. Looking at it today, with its extraordinary forest of wings rising above a boat-like hull, it seems almost impossible. Nine wings. Eight engines. A huge wooden structure intended to carry around one hundred people across the Atlantic Ocean at a time when commercial aviation itself was barely learning to walk. It looked less like an airplane than a cathedral that had suddenly decided it wanted to fly. And behind this astonishing creation stood an Italian engineer who possessed one dangerous quality shared by many of history’s great inventors: Gianni Caproni refused to accept that something was impossible simply because nobody had done it yet.
To understand the Ca.60, we have to forget everything we know about modern air travel. Imagine the world immediately after the First World War. Aviation was still young, uncomfortable and dangerous. Aircraft were made largely of wood, fabric, wires and courage. Pilots sat inside machines that shook, leaked, vibrated and occasionally seemed to have personal disagreements with gravity. Long-distance passenger flying was not yet an ordinary business. The idea that one day ordinary people would cross oceans in aircraft, eating dinner while thousands of metres above the sea, would have sounded to many like science fiction. But Gianni Caproni had already seen something extraordinary during the war: aircraft were becoming bigger, more powerful and capable of carrying increasingly heavy loads. Caproni had built large multi-engine bombers, and while Europe was still trying to recover from the destruction of war, he began asking a very different question. If huge aircraft could carry bombs, why could they not carry people? If engineers had learned to send machines across the sky to destroy cities, could they not now use the same knowledge to connect continents?
That is where the Ca.60 becomes more than just an eccentric airplane. At its heart was an almost idealistic thought. Caproni imagined peaceful aerial travel on an enormous scale. He believed large flying boats could cross the Atlantic, linking Europe and America. Oceans were still barriers that required days aboard ships. Caproni wanted to make them highways through the sky. He envisioned a machine carrying dozens upon dozens of passengers, a kind of airborne ocean liner. In an age when many aircraft barely carried two or three people, he was thinking about one hundred. That is the human part of the story that photographs of the Ca.60 sometimes hide. Those enormous wings were not built simply because an engineer wanted to show off. They were built because a man was trying to imagine the future before the future existed.
Caproni was born in 1886 in Arco, in what was then part of Austria-Hungary and would later become part of Italy. He studied engineering and devoted himself to aviation at a time when doing so was almost an act of faith. The Wright brothers had made their historic powered flight only a few years earlier. There were no generations of aeronautical engineers to consult, no decades of textbooks explaining everything. Early aviation engineers were writing the textbooks with every machine they built, sometimes successfully and sometimes painfully. Caproni became one of Italy’s most important aviation pioneers, and his wartime bombers demonstrated his ability to think on a large scale. But peace gave him the opportunity to dream differently.
The machine that emerged from that dream was officially the Caproni Ca.60 Transaereo, although history remembers it wonderfully as the Noviplano, essentially the “nine-wing aircraft.” And nine wings really were there, arranged in three groups of three: one set toward the front, another near the middle and another toward the rear. It was an extraordinary solution created from a logical problem. Caproni wanted to lift a very heavy aircraft using the technology available in 1920. Modern powerful engines, lightweight alloys, advanced aerodynamic modelling and composite materials did not exist. So if you needed more lift, one answer was simply more wing.
Caproni looked at the problem and apparently decided that if three wings were useful, perhaps nine would be even more persuasive.
The result was magnificent, absurd, beautiful and slightly terrifying all at once.
Eight American Liberty V12 engines were installed to push and pull the enormous flying boat through the air. The hull was designed to operate from water, because airports capable of handling gigantic aircraft barely existed. Lakes and seas, however, offered enormous natural runways. The machine was assembled at Sesto Calende on Lake Maggiore, a place deeply connected with Italian aviation. Imagine what local workers must have thought as the structure grew. Carpenters, mechanics, engineers and technicians were constructing something unlike anything they had ever seen. Wing followed wing, strut followed strut, wire followed wire, until the thing standing before them must have seemed less like an aircraft under construction than a building site that had somehow developed propellers.
And this is where the story becomes wonderfully human. We often look at historical machines and see only the name of the famous designer. But the Ca.60 was also made by anonymous hands. Men shaped timber, stretched fabric, fitted cables, mounted engines and solved thousands of small practical problems. There were no computers checking stresses. No digital simulations showing airflow around those nine wings. Engineers worked with calculations, experience, models and instinct. Craftsmen transformed drawings into physical pieces. Someone tightened every bolt. Someone climbed onto every structure. Someone stood beside those giant wings on freezing mornings and wondered whether this impossible contraption would genuinely leave the lake.
Caproni believed it would.
And eventually, the Ca.60 was ready to move.
There must have been an extraordinary atmosphere around Lake Maggiore during the first tests. Curiosity, pride, doubt, excitement. The giant aircraft floated on the water, an object that looked as if three triplanes had been stacked together after a particularly enthusiastic evening at the drawing board. Engines roared across the lake. Propellers churned the air. The machine accelerated through the water. And behind the controls sat test pilot Federico Semprini, one of those largely forgotten men whose courage made early aviation possible.
Today we climb into an airplane, find our seat, complain because the Wi-Fi is slow and become annoyed if the coffee arrives ten minutes late. Semprini climbed into an experimental nine-wing flying boat powered by eight engines that had never truly flown before.
There is confidence, and then there is that.
During the early tests in 1921, the enormous machine showed that it could move rapidly across the water and briefly become airborne. Then came the decisive attempt in March. The Ca.60 accelerated across Lake Maggiore and finally rose. For a few extraordinary seconds, Gianni Caproni’s impossible dream was no longer sitting on the water.
It was flying.
Imagine Caproni watching from the shore.
This machine existed because he had refused to laugh at his own idea. Engineers had calculated it. Workers had built it. Critics had probably doubted it. And now nine enormous wings were above the lake. Perhaps, in those few seconds, he could already see the future he had imagined: passengers crossing the Atlantic, Europe and America brought closer together, giant aircraft becoming as normal as ocean liners.
Then the dream fell.
The aircraft climbed only a short distance before losing control and crashing violently back into the lake. The huge wooden structure broke apart. Semprini survived. Caproni’s masterpiece did not.
What caused the crash has been discussed ever since. The behaviour of the heavy aircraft, its unusual aerodynamic configuration and the ballast carried during testing all played roles in the difficult circumstances surrounding the flight, and some details remain debated. But what mattered emotionally was painfully simple: the machine Caproni had invested so much hope into was suddenly wreckage floating on Lake Maggiore.
There are photographs of the damaged Ca.60 after the accident, and they are strangely sad. Not because a piece of machinery has been broken. Machines can be rebuilt. What makes those photographs powerful is knowing what had been placed inside that machine before takeoff: years of ideas, calculations, labour and expectation.
Caproni initially wanted to rebuild it.
That detail tells us almost everything about him.
After watching his gigantic aircraft collapse into the water, his instinct was not immediately to declare the idea impossible. He wanted another attempt. He still believed in what the machine represented. But rebuilding such an enormous experimental aircraft required money, materials and support, and the resources were not there. Eventually the Ca.60 project was abandoned. Much of the wreckage disappeared, although parts of the aircraft were preserved and can still remind us today that this extraordinary creation was not a fantasy from an illustrator’s imagination. It really existed. Men really built it. A pilot really sat inside it. Eight engines really started. And, however briefly, it really left the surface of Lake Maggiore.
If we judge the Ca.60 only by conventional standards, the conclusion seems obvious: it failed.
But that is also a rather unfair way to look at history.
Gianni Caproni was wrong about many details of the aircraft, but he was astonishingly right about the future.
Large passenger aircraft did come.
Hundreds of people would eventually cross oceans through the air. Flying boats would become important during the development of long-distance commercial aviation. Multiple engines would carry passengers safely across huge distances. Aircraft would become flying machines of such enormous dimensions that even the Ca.60’s planned capacity of around one hundred passengers would one day seem modest.
Caproni had tried to build the destination before technology had finished constructing the road leading to it.
That is why the Ca.60 deserves affection rather than ridicule.
Yes, it was outrageous. Yes, it was complicated. Yes, from certain angles it resembles an apartment building involved in a serious misunderstanding about its professional ambitions. And yes, nine wings are probably several more wings than most aircraft absolutely require.
But there is something deeply Italian about the audacity of it.
It came from the same cultural instinct that has repeatedly produced engineers, artists, designers and inventors unwilling to separate beauty from ambition. Caproni did not merely ask whether an airplane could fly. He asked how aircraft might change human life. He imagined people sitting together inside a gigantic flying machine, leaving Europe and arriving across an ocean.
Remember: this was 1921.
Commercial aviation had barely begun.
There were people alive who had been born before anyone had ever flown an airplane at all.
And Caproni was already thinking about mass transatlantic air travel.
Perhaps the most touching image is not the Ca.60 in flight, but Gianni Caproni standing near his creation. Behind the engineering photographs and formal clothes was a man looking at something that previously existed only inside his head. Every inventor knows that peculiar moment: an idea becomes an object. Other people can touch it. They can criticize it. They can laugh at it. And once that happens, the dream becomes vulnerable.
The Ca.60 was extremely vulnerable.
It had thousands of wooden components, cables and fabric surfaces. It depended on engines, weather, water and a pilot courageous enough to trust the calculations of everybody on shore.
And still they tried.
That may be the most important part of its story.
Not the crash.
The attempt.
There is something moving about a group of people gathering beside an Italian lake a little over a century ago and collectively deciding to see whether a hundred-passenger flying boat with nine wings could cross the sky. Nobody could guarantee success. Nobody could show Caproni a photograph of a Boeing 747 and say, “Don’t worry, Gianni. Your basic idea turns out fine eventually.”
They had only belief.
The Ca.60 never carried passengers across the Atlantic. No family boarded it for New York. No waiter served dinner above the ocean. No traveller looked through its windows and watched Europe disappear behind the horizon.
Yet, in a strange way, every modern passenger aircraft carries a little of Caproni’s dream.
The technology is different. The wings are fewer, which is probably reassuring. The aircraft are safer, faster and infinitely more sophisticated. But the fundamental dream is exactly the same: take many human beings, place them inside a machine heavier than air and carry them across enormous distances that once separated entire worlds.
Today millions of us do it without thinking.
Gianni Caproni thought about it when almost nobody else could imagine it.
And that is why the great Noviplano should not be remembered as the ridiculous aircraft that crashed into a lake.
It should be remembered as one of those beautiful failures from which human progress is built.
A machine too early for its century.
A pilot brave enough to fly it.
Workers stubborn enough to build it.
And an Italian engineer standing beside Lake Maggiore, looking at nine wings and believing that somewhere beyond them was America.
For a few seconds in 1921, his impossible dream rose above the water.
And perhaps those few seconds were enough to prove that sometimes a dream does not need to reach its destination to show us where the future is going.