Piattellissimo (oz16622)

About this Plan

Piattellissimo. Radio control sailplane model, for electric power. Wingspan 118 in.

Direct submission to Outerzone.

Quote: "Dear Steve, Last winter I developed a CAD Construction for the AP 13 (oz16626) from Fidia Piattelli in 1938.

Fidia Piattelli, born on 15th Dec. 1907 in Rome. During his life he spent time in Italy and Britain constructing aircrafts, gliders and model planes. One day he founded a school for model airplane enthusiasts in North Italy in “Reggio Emilia”. We all would have liked to visit such a school when we were young :) and it must have been fantastic for the young modelers, and a lot of them qualified for national championships. In 1938, the year when he was clamped down by racism (during the two black decades) he was stopped working for Caproni and set on house arrest in Trentino. Imagine what essential questions he was asking himself about life and future, but just in that period he developed the AP 13 (oz16626), a bird-like sailplane with 2600mm wingspan and a really marvelous design. May be it was his way of survival strategy to focus on something he likes most: Airplanes!

I was very impressed by the Piattelli AP13 Design when I saw a 3 side drawing done by Frank Zaic and I started to read all about Fidia that was available in the www. It was love at first sight and I was pregnant for a few years, than I started my calculations and stated, if I find a design with glide ratio and minimum sinking that could be in the area of the Holland, it would make sense to draw this design in CAD and bring it back to life. There were 3 modelers very interested, Christoph Kopp (Hattingen), Stephan Fundel (Forstinning, member of the board of directors of https://antikmodellflugfreunde.de/) and Gero Schüttman (Bad Bentheim) and so I started in 2025 with the construction. Goal was a good flying and practicable model so the span from the original was enlarges to 3 meters / 118 inch. The Italian language has different possibilities to bring up a Superlative and one is the ending “issimo”. So the name was clear very soon and this redesign of Fidia Piattellis AP13 is called Piattellissimo. Translation means very flat, but it comes more like quiet or balanced. So the Piattellissimo should be a very calm and forgiving flyer.

Piattelli, to come back to his lifeline, went to Tel Aviv with his wife 1945 to bring up aviation industry and made it up to Chief engineer in the research department of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. At the same time, Piattelli continued to teach aeronautics at the Technion in Haifa, laying the foundation for what would later become the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Israel Polytechnic University. In August 1957 Piattelli was shot down during a robbery in Tel Aviv cinema and died later in hospital. He lives only a half century but he left his traces of flight fascination, ideas, thrilling enthusiasm for topics like flying, arts, musics and love. So my hope is to see this flame in your eyes when you see this plan of the Piattellissimo or even the model flying.

By this weekend Christoph will fetch his laser parts from my hobby shop. I build the wing - and stab - joiners including sleeves for him, and he will be the first one of us to build this plane in 2026. Hopefuls he will share some pictures, but what he already did was AI-assisted design chase for the bird and that brings up some really cool ideas for coloring.

Cheers Matthias"

Note the main planfile here is a single PDF file with 17 sheets. This serves as a quick overview. For a more detailed (itemised) view, see the supplement file "named_sheets.zip" for the same plan, but here each plan sheet has a title of material and size. Then of course there is the CAD parts file download in DXF format. Steve.

CAD file

This plan is available for download in CAD format.

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