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Genoa, July 15, 1864 - † Genoa, January 15, 1938
Rinaldo Piaggio is an Italian entrepreneur and senator, creator of the famous Piaggio firm.
One year after having opened a sawmill intended for the shipyards of the city of Genoa, Rinaldo Piaggio created, in Sestri Ponente, the Società Rinaldo Piaggio specializing in naval equipment. In 1890, he began to produce railway material. In 1915, he bought the Officine Aeronautiche Francesco Oneto and, under the Piaggio Aero brand, began to produce aeronautical equipment. In 1924, under American license, he manufactured the first Jupiter-type engines that fitted the new planes of the Dornier Wal company. In the 1930s, was built the only Italian four-engine bomber, the Piaggio P.108, which was put into service in 1942.
His two sons, Armando (1901-1978) and Enrico (1905-1965) launched a famous scooter just after World War II under the Vespa brand.
Rinaldo Piaggio was elevated to the rank of senator in 1934.
Rinaldo Piaggio was born in an important family of Genoese entrepreneurs: his grandfather Giovanni Battista, a marine captain, was one of the brothers of Erasmus Piaggio (an Italian entrepreneur, shipowner and banker), while his father Enrico, owner and merchant, had established a sawmill in Sestri Ponente in 1882.
At the age of just over twenty, in October 1884, Piaggio founded the company Rinaldo Piaggio in Sestri Ponente, taking over the business from his father and directing it towards the production of naval furniture. After three years of activity, in 1887, he transformed the company into Piaggio & C .: The company, of which he was the general partner, extended its production to a factory near the Cantieri Odero di Sestri Ponente. The cabinetmakers of the company designed the furniture for the most beautiful Italian and foreign ships of the turn of the century: from the start of the activity to the first years of the 20th century, 63 steamboats were to be equipped by the company. Piaggio works for all the major Genoese shipyards, but the strongest relationship is the one established with the shipowners family of Odero: he married the daughter of Niccolò Odero, who also entered the capital of Piaggio and C. in 1895, taking over shares of previous shareholders.
At the start of the new century, despite the good performance of the company, the possibilities for future expansion seemed to be running out. Piaggio decided to use the skills developed in the naval furnishing sector to extend his activities to the railway sector, starting a construction and repair activity for freight and passenger cars for Italian railway companies. To respond to the growth prospects of the sector, in 1906 he founded the Officine di Finalmarina in Finale Ligure, with his brother-in-law Attilio Odero - who provided 2/3 of the share capital.
The growth of the company in the naval furniture and railway construction sector was consolidated during the first decade of the 20th century, but it was the First World War that decisively increased the demand in the sector. The construction of traditional means of transport, ships and trains and at the same time opened a new frontier: aeronautics. In 1915, Piaggio began repairing and then building military seaplanes. The turning point of this story came in 1917 when, in search of new factories, he took over an aeronautical company in Pisa. From an industrial point of view, it was a wise choice, given the importance of the Tuscan city in the national panorama of the nascent aeronautical industry, attested among other things by the opening of one of the first Italian airports: 'Arturo dell'Oro'. While Piaggio was now considered a successful entrepreneur nationally, the company, with three production sites, ranked authoritatively among the major national companies in terms of size, number of employees, production volume and turnover. The correlated diversification also allowed the entrepreneur to get through the troubled post-war period better than other large firms in the engineering sector. The uncertainties of the post-war period, marked by the difficult conversion to the economy of peace, nevertheless convinced Piaggio of the need to strengthen the structure of the company, through an alliance with a financially solid partner and endowed with high skills in finance and business management. In 1920, Piaggio & C. was dissolved and reconstituted into a limited company "Piaggio & C .": the new structure, with Attilio Odero as chairman, renewed traditional family and financial ties.
In the railway sector, significant new milestones were quickly reached: major orders from national and foreign markets followed one another, including the royal train built for the House of Savoy in the early 1920s and the construction of electric motors.
On the political level, after the war, Piaggio would take the party of the extreme right by founding the Association for the Renewal, which was then absorbed by the national fascist party. In addition to re-launching railway production, the most important entrepreneurial challenge of those years was precisely the development of the aeronautics sector, of which he quickly became one of the most important pioneers.
In 1921, together with Attilio Odero and a group of Piedmontese entrepreneurs - including Giovanni Agnelli - a Ligurian and Tuscan, he founded the limited Italian aeronautical construction company, later CMASA, in Marina di Pisa, for the construction of seaplanes under license from the German Dornier- Metallbauten GmbH. The new phase of expansion was based on the search for the best technicians and on the modernization of systems. Piaggio pushed the company to acquire many foreign patents and at the same time hired some of the most esteemed Italian designers, among which the most important was Giovanni Pegna.
The trend of production and the expectations of the new society persuaded him to undertake a further expansion of the scale of production. He was particularly attracted by the opportunity to build his own aircraft engines and for this purpose acquired the national plant of mechanical engineering of Pontedera in 1924, a workshop created before the war by the mechanical section of the local agricultural consortium. Piaggio was at this stage one of the few Italian entrepreneurs engaged in aeronautics, and his dynamism in this high-tech sector made him a character who would rise to the highest ranks of the national economic elite: in 1922, he received the title of Commendatore of the Order of the Crown and in 1925 of Grand Officer of the Crown; in 1934, he was appointed senator of the Kingdom.
Also in the 1920s, the entrepreneur began a process of downstream integration, founding in 1926 the limited company of air navigation (SANA) - which would create the first Italian airline for passenger transport, with flights connecting Rome to Barcelona and Palermo - and upstream, by buying and managing forestry companies in the Maremma and the Agro Romano, as functional production units for the supply of charcoal and the production of wood necessary for railway and aeronautics construction. The expansion phase of the 1920s prompted Piaggio and Odero to increase their share capital, which rose from 15 to 30 million lire in 1930, to cope with the expansion of production (the latter was, however, abruptly interrupted by the repercussions of the great crisis of 1929, which marked the beginning of one of the most critical phases in the life of the company). Piaggio's response to the crisis was largely based on strengthening research and development programs: in addition to Giovanni Pegna, the company acquired the skills of other great figures in aeronautical engineering, such as Giovanni Gabrielli, Giovanni Casiraghi and, above all, Corradino d'Ascanio, the brilliant designer from Abruzzo who in 1930 created one of the world's first prototype helicopters and in 1934, and soon after joining Piaggio, patented the inflight variable pitch propeller. In the 1930s he built several planes, both fighters and bombers, such as the Piaggio P.108, the only Italian four-engine bomber.
Having struggled to overcome the consequences of the 1929 crisis during the 1930s (in December 1932 the share capital fell from 30 to 10 million lire), the entrepreneur gradually extended the shareholding to his sons Armando and Enrico, as part of a revival of production linked to the new objectives of military expansion of the fascist regime. At the time of Piaggio's death in 1938, the company was one of the main Italian groups in the mechanical sector, equipped with four modern factories and with a turnover of over 160 million lire.
The company Piaggio & C. founded in 1884 by Rinaldo Piaggio in Sestri Ponente, had as main activity in the railway sector. In 1915, with the purchase of the Francesco Oneto aeronautical factory, the production of equipment for the nascent aeronautics industry began. In 1964, the two motorcycle and aircraft divisions were officially split into two distinct companies: aeronautical production continued with Armando (then with Rinaldo, the grandson of the founder of the same name) in the Sestri Ponente factory under the name Industrie Aeronautiche e Meccaniche Rinaldo Piaggio, while production of the Vespa continued at the Pontedera plant.
Its re-foundation in 1998 was based on the takeover of Rinaldo Piaggio SpA, by entrepreneurs such as engineer Jose Di Mase and engineer Piero Ferrari (vice-president of Ferrari SpA).
On November 9, 2004, Pratt & Whitney granted the production of a key part of the F135 engine that would equip the F-35 JSF (Joint Strike Fighter) to Piaggio Aero. This agreement was part of the System Development and Demonstration program. The two contracts, worth approximately US $ 150 million, were awarded after a 6-month selection.
In November 2005, Avantair placed a firm order for 36 Avanti IIs, for a market of $ 230 million (€ 194 million). The first turboprop engines to be delivered in 2005.
In October 2014, Piaggio Aero changed its name and became Piaggio Aerospace.
On December 9, 2014, Avanti's third evolution, the Avanti EVO was certified by EASA.
On November 22, 2018, the company was placed in receivership. In June 2019, the Italian government announced contracts worth around 700 million euros for the Italian Ministry of Defense to help the company.
The company employs 1,450 technicians and has two main factories in Liguria at Finale Ligure and in Genoa-Sestri Ponente, but also has a site in Nice (Piaggio Aero France) and Florida (Piaggio America Inc. with head office in West Palm Beach) and also recently settled in Pozzuoli (Pozzuoli), near Naples. Its share capital was increased to 80 million euros and its turnover (2001) was 120 million euros.
Piaggio Aero's cutting-edge product is the P.180 Avanti (bought in particular by Marina militare and Avantair), the only business aircraft with three airfoils, twin-jet and turboprop, with an astonishing and avant-garde design (9 passengers, 1 or 2 pilots).
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