Dornier Do X2 Umberto Maddalena

The Do X2 was the second of the three Do Xs ever built and the first of the two sold to Italy; its twin was the Do X3 Alessandro Guidoni (I-ABBN). Both aircraft were ordered in 1931 for the Società Anonima Navigazione Aerea (SANA), then Italy's state airline, which wanted them for Mediterranean traffic. German Wikipedia places that service along Italy's west coast from Genoa to Tripoli; English Wikipedia describes a first-class Genoa–Gibraltar service. Neither plan was ever put into practice. The aircraft was registered I-REDI and named in honour of Umberto Maddalena.

Umberto Maddalena (Bottrighe, 14 December 1894 – Tirrenia, 19 March 1931) was an Italian naval aviator who transferred to the Regia Aeronautica in 1923. In 1928 he took off from Orbetello in a Savoia-Marchetti S.55A to search for the survivors of Umberto Nobile's airship Italia in the Arctic. He was killed on 19 March 1931, together with his two crewmen, when his Savoia-Marchetti S.64 bis exploded in flight during a positioning flight ahead of a record attempt. That same year his name was given to the big Dornier flying boat, which carried it for its whole service life.

The Italian aircraft were slightly larger than the original and had a different powerplant and engine mounts. Instead of the Curtiss Conquerors then fitted to the German boat, I-REDI had twelve Fiat A.22R liquid-cooled V12 engines, with the six tandem mounts covered by a streamlined fairing. Sources disagree on the power of each engine: Italian Wikipedia gives 570 hp (425 kW) and German Wikipedia about 600 PS (440 kW), in both cases less than the Curtiss engines. Dornier claimed the X2 was the largest aircraft in the world at the time.

According to English Wikipedia the Do X2 entered service in August 1931. After crossing the Alps from the factory it barely belonged to SANA: the aircraft was requisitioned and taken into the Regia Aeronautica fleet, which based it first at the seaplane station at La Spezia (Cadimare) on the Ligurian Sea and later at other bases. From there it flew training sorties for the air force's higher war school and officer training cruises, aeronaval manoeuvres and prestige flights. Its use as a bomber was also tried, for which it received a glazed tail position; the result was judged unsatisfactory.

Its most visible role was propaganda. The air force staged flights around Italy to make the high and controversial cost of the two aircraft more acceptable to the public. The Archivio Luce holds a series of photographs dated 19 September 1931 showing Umberto Maddalena moored on Lake Bracciano, mechanics working beside a propeller of one of its twelve engines, the preparations for departure and the aircraft passing over Rome, above the Vittoriano and Piazza Venezia, bound for Naples. A rumour recorded by the Luftfahrtmuseum Hannover says the Italian Do Xs carried troops towards Ethiopia, but it is unconfirmed.

English Wikipedia says the X2 lost its tail section in a botched landing, an accident identical to the one suffered by Lufthansa's Do X1a near Passau in 1933 and coming one month after it. German Wikipedia adds that it was withdrawn in 1935 after a third mishap. Its exact end is uncertain: in the English account the Italian aircraft were mothballed at Marina di Pisa in 1935 and broken up in 1937; German Wikipedia also gives 1937 for the scrapping, "probably because of technically and economically unjustifiable effort"; Italian Wikipedia says they ended up laid up and demolished in the La Spezia yards, and the Hannover museum considers scrapping at La Spezia as early as 1935 the most likely outcome. Of I-REDI and its twin only a few parts survive, displayed at the museum of the Politecnico di Torino in the section devoted to the engineer Giuseppe Gabrielli.