SIAI-Marchetti was an Italian aircraft manufacturer primarily active during the interwar period.
History
On 12 August 1915 Domenico Lorenzo Santoni and Luigi Capè founded the company SIAI (Società Idrovolanti Alta Italia – Seaplane Company of Upper Italy).[1] As suggested by its name, the firm initially specialised in the manufacture of seaplanes, the vast majority of them intended for the Italian armed forces. Perhaps its most prominent early design was the SIAI S.16, a seaplane which had been configured to perform both aerial reconnaissance and bomber roles, but which also proved itself quite capable of long-distance flights. During 1925, Italian aviator Francesco de Pinedo of the Regia Aeronautica (Italian Royal Air Force) used an SIAI S.16ter he named Genariello for a record-setting flight from Rome to Australia and Tokyo to demonstrate his idea that seaplanes were superior to landplanes for long-distance flights. Having departed Rome on 21 April, de Pinedo and his mechanic, Ernesto Campanelli, visited dozens of countries, often stopping for multiple weeks at a time, particularly in Australia, before successfully arriving in Tokyo on 26 September 1925.[2][3]