Dornier Do X Do X2 Umberto Maddalena

Two of the three Do Xs built came from an Italian order. The private airline Società Anonima Navigazione Aerea (SANA) wanted them on long Mediterranean routes, Genoa to Tripoli, with an eye on extending the service to Rhodes and the Dodecanese later. Once the company had studied what the first German boat actually cost to run, it decided an aircraft that size was unaffordable and declined delivery. Both flying boats went instead to the Regia Aeronautica, which in the years of Italo Balbo's ocean crossings had every reason to want the prestige they carried.

The visible difference from the German aircraft was the powerplant: twelve Fiat A.22R liquid-cooled V12s, in the same six tandem nacelles but now enclosed by a continuous streamlined fairing. The Do X2 wore an Italian civil registration for the delivery flight from Germany — an Alpine crossing staged as a public event — before taking a military serial. It reached Italy at the end of August 1931.

The first-class Genoa–Gibraltar service that had been sketched out was judged unworkable, so the Do X2 was based at the seaplane station at La Spezia on the Ligurian Sea and put to work on officer training cruises, naval air exercises and display flights around Italy — the last of these largely to justify to the public what the two boats had cost. Its use as a bomber was tested as well, and for that a glazed tail position was fitted.

The Do X2 repeated the Passau accident almost detail for detail, losing its tail section in a mishandled landing. After flights and crew numbers were cut back through 1934, both Italian boats were laid up at Marina di Pisa and broken up for scrap in 1937, having never flown the commercial service they were ordered for.