Stelio Frati and his F-22

Carl Miller

Thursday, September 09, 2010 at 06:59 PM ET

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Stelio Frati's F-22 Pinguino Jim Winn

Key Takeaways:

The author explored importing Stelio Frati's elegant F-22 Pinguino aircraft to America in 1998, but the Italian manufacturer, General Avia, was on the verge of bankruptcy.
The F-22 was praised for its beautiful design, docile handling, and aerobatic capabilities, reflecting Frati's emphasis on aesthetics and flight experience over commercial viability, despite being built to business-jet quality.
Despite a US certification advantage, the opportunity to import the F-22 was lost due to General Avia's financial collapse and a prohibitive $2 million license fee, leaving the well-designed aircraft commercially unappreciated.

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I may have been the last person to consider bringing the late Stelio Frati’s F-22 Pinguino to America. Mooney apparently looked at the program, and Roy LoPresti, who also sought to produce the SwiftFury, was interested. By the time I arrived at the General Avia factory in Perugia, Italy, on a frigid January day in 1998, the company was on life support, and shortly thereafter was bankrupt.

I never met Frati, who was a designer, not a manufacturing engineer or marketer. So I know him only through his aircraft, some of which enjoyed commercial success, notably the agile and lovely Siai Marchetti SF.260. But I surmise that Frati’s motives had more to do with the aesthetic and experiential aspects of flight than the commercial ones.