LAKE COMO FLYING CLUB
Italy’s Lake Como is the site of the world’s oldest seaplane base. Dale Drinnon takes a very special flight over Villa d’Este
Landing on water has never been so glam
‘ Hey, Carlo,’ I say into the headset mic, ‘can we swing towards Villa d’Este?’ He gives a little nod from the front seat and banks the aircraft around, wings flashing vivid Cub Yellow. A quick flyby seems only fitting; down below, admirers linger among some of the world’s most exotic cars after one of the world’s most celebrated concours, and for many regulars the experience wouldn’t be complete without the added magic of seaplanes over Lake Como. Style and charisma, after all, aren’t exclusive to vehicles of the roadgoing variety.
Of course, Italy is synonymous with beautiful, desirable cars, and Octane readers will immediately associate Lake Como with the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, founded in 1929 and home every spring to those worthy of Shakespearian love sonnets. Even the concours faithful, however, often don’t know that the yellow Piper Cub and its stablemates they watch swooping across the water year upon year are part of a flying tradition of equal heritage, if not greater.
Lake Como aviation dates from the balloon era, and in 1913, a mere three years after Frenchman Henri Fabre made the first successful powered flight from water, it hosted Il Gran Circuito dei Laghi, a seaplane Grand Prix of the lakes, won by legendary aviator Roland Garros. In 1930, a group of enthusiasts established the Aero Club Como, in the city that gave its name to the lake, from which the organisation flies to this day.
It’s the oldest seaplane base in the world, continuously operated since its inception except for a brief period during the Second World War, when the northward retreating Wehrmacht reportedly sent the Club’s planes to the bottom of the 400-metre deep lake as a pre-emptive strike – likely a prudent measure, given that Mussolini’s final dispatch was at the hands of local partisans and conducted a few villages up the shore.
The terms seaplane and floatplane are often interchanged, but to most connoisseurs seaplane is the preferred generic for any fixed-wing aircraft that can fly from water, either inland or ocean, whereas floatplane is a specific type with pontoons hung below the fuselage. Flying boats are essentially boat hulls with wings (like the Short Sunderland or PBY Catalina). Both floatplanes and flying boats can be amphibious: equipped with retractable wheels and capable of operating from land as well as water.
That such marvellous inventions should find a following in Como was probably inevitable. Take-off and landing without expensively contoured stretches of viable real estate held great appeal for pioneer experimenters – witness the efforts of Langley and Voisin – and Italy was an early adopter of the concept, no doubt thanks to its extreme ratio of coastline to land mass.
Italy participated in every Schneider Trophy seaplane race. From the initial 1913 event on, the progenitor of Britain’s renowned Supermarine Spitfire won three and was controversially disqualified after winning a fourth. In addition, Italy’s Schneider-intended but never raced Macchi MC 72 retains the piston-engined speed record for seaplanes even yet, set in 1934 at 440.681mph. The nation’s first airlines were almost totally water-based, and Italian aviators of the genre became world famous between the Wars, including adventurer Francesco de Pinedo, the ‘Italian Lindbergh’.
Alas, the glory days of all marine aviation were shortlived: World War Two left behind a global abundance of dry aerodromes. Seaplanes were soon largely relegated to service in remote bush areas – along with, fortunately, general aviation use in beautiful resort locations surrounded by rough, undulating, runway-hostile terrain and close to large bodies of water. Such as Como. The Club has prospered ever since.
Today the Aero Club Como is a busy seaplane flight school, Europe’s biggest, where students can either add a seaplane rating to their PPL (Private Pilot’s Licence) or learn to fly from scratch. It’s also a restoration and maintenance facility, offers hourly rentals, provides aircraft for film shoots, and everything else incomegenerating you’d expect of a not-for-profit organisation, staffed heavily by volunteers.
The main hangar is available for corporate and private functions, too, and club manager and driving force Cesare Baj, long-time Como resident and newspaperman, historian, instructor, and authority on all things seaplane, sounds especially pleased with the nights when the Como Film Festival uses the club’s hangar doors as an open-air movie screen. Core membership averages 200 Italians, plus 250-ish outside Italy. The club’s fleet numbers roughly a dozen planes, modern and historic, including a recently acquired 1947 Republic RC-3 Seabee.
Pride of place, at least as far as I’m concerned, goes to the delectable Piper Cub. The Cub is both a classic and a perennial, manufactured by Piper Aircraft USA in original Model J-3 form between 1938 and 1947 (and evolved from a design launched eight years earlier still), then resumed as the upgraded, hot-rodded Super Cub Model PA18 from 1949 to 1983, and again in ’88 to ’94, when this example was built. Faithful replicas are in current production.
Throughout the run, Cub Yellow has been the standard colour, although purists will argue variations in shade, and improvements to engines and ancillaries notwithstanding the basic design remains the same traditional fabric-covered ‘tail-dragger’ – that is, the third of its three wheels is out back, not under the nose (float conversions are an aftermarket job). Cubs were always aimed at the more affordable market, by founding philosophy, and in innocent, litigation-lite 1950s America my uncle Leonard could comfortably afford to fly a secondhand J-3 on the income of an hourly-wage welder.
Right Lake Como is a suitably glamorous backdrop for the world’s oldest seaplane base; bright yellow Piper Cub is the perfect craft for getting around here.
‘Seaplanes were largely relegated to remote areas – and beautiful resorts surrounded by runway-hostile terrain. Like Como’
‘There’s no such thing as an “ordinary” plane – they can fly, for goodness’ sake. Light aircraft are airborne Formula Fords’
Founding philosophy furthermore made the tiny Cub nimble and responsive, the sensory equivalent of a vintage biplane, and it’s not uncommon to see them scoot to and fro in pleasant weather with the single door locked open – or removed entirely. A pretty good match, when you think about it, to the Austin-Healey 100 we’ve driven to the Aero Club: two classic motoring products of the same era, Spartan, reasonably priced, userfriendly, and huge fun, ideal for young people with still-fresh memories of a terrible war and a determination to enjoy life for a while.
Our pilot Carlo, an Aero Club volunteer flight instructor who earned his PPL here as a teenager and now flies for a major airline (and like flyers from Charles Royce through to the Mercury Seven, is an ardent car guy), says the biplane comparison extends to practical matters as well. In addition to the usual pre-flight fuel contaminants check, radio check, controls inspection and so forth, his walk-around includes the network of various biplane-like struts and cables securing the floats and commanding the rudders used for aquatic steering, plus, this being an amphibian, the wheels that emphatically must be retracted into the floats whenever the plane moves through water.
Those floats have to be purged of leakage during his pre-flight as well, and by hand pump, after removing black rubber plugs from access holes atop each pontoon. Carlo tells me ‘You know, those plugs used to be white, but seagulls thought they were food and stole them, so they made them black instead.’ Only much later do I wonder if that’s the seaplane counterpart of sending the rookie for a left-handed screwdriver… at the time, though, I’m climbing into the cockpit and kid-in-a-sweet-shop focused on the sheer exhilaration of it all.
Don’t be put off by the sneering of computer-game fighter aces, there’s no such thing as an ‘ordinary’ airplane – they can
fly, for goodness’ sake. Light aircraft such as the Super Cub are airborne Formula Fords, rally-prepped Mini Coopers with lift. The minuscule seat, knees-scrunched-up-againstarmpits stance and naked widgets everywhere are pure Series 1 Lotus Seven. The obligatory engine run-up before we taxi out would be deafening sans headphones, and I’m surprised that, despite appearances, a static Cub on floats very much feels nosehigh, like its tail-wheel cousins do on land.
‘A sea pilot also has to be part sailor,’ Carlos says, as he enters the buoy-marked runway area. ‘The water is really busy here in summer, and your situational awareness, very important for any kind of flying, has to extend to waves and boat wakes and crisscrossing water traffic – extremely dangerous stuff during take-off and landing. So I love the lake on still, calm, smooth winter days; it’s like landing on silk.’
Then, satisfied that we’re clear, he progressively throttles-up; the PA-18’s uprated 180 horsepower may not seem impressive by supercar standards but, in an airframe first issued with 40, it puts us on the step of the floats, like a ski-boat, with a heartswelling surge. Carlo pulls back and we’re airborne, undercarriage trailing wet streamers in the wind, and with both water and land dropping away behind, the Piper transitions into a natural creature of the sky, the tiniest change in air density or direction telegraphed instantly as microscopic movements travelling through its skin and directly to your spine. It’s as though the machine itself is tingling with excitement.
The ceiling is high and virtually unlimited, stunning mountain vistas stretch around the full compass, and time, distance and altitude pass by in a glorious, awe-inspiring eye-blink. Carlo is already tapering the climb rate when I realise where we are. ‘Hey, Carlo…’, I say into the mic, and he rudders left to Villa d’Este. Down there I know faces are tilting upwards, and I wouldn’t trade chairs right now for any on the concours lawn.