The Piaggio P.180 Avanti II is one of the most unusual, even exotic, looking airplanes in production today. When you look at the airplane and wonder “why did they do that,” the answer is always the same — to fly the biggest cabin the fastest for the least fuel. Efficiency drove every decision Piaggio engineers made when the airplane was created in the late 1980s.
Facing the huge runup in fuel prices of the past year, it is sometimes hard to remember that the worry in the previous oil crisis was of availability more than price. In the 1970s oil experts — at least the ones who got our attention — warned that the world was running out of oil at any price, and that the regions that had the oil were so politically unstable that supply disruptions were a certainty. It was in that climate of very little oil left that Piaggio set out to make the best use of the fuel available with the Avanti.
