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P.32
Medium Bomber
Piaggio
 In 1936, Piaggio presented its P.32 high-speed bomber project to the technical committee for consideration and received quite positive feedback. According to preliminary calculations, the Italian high-speed bomber in terms of speed characteristics should have surpassed Soviet SB and American Martin 139 (B-10/12), not inferior to them in terms of bomb load and flight range.
Tests of the bomber began in January 1936 and were completed only at the end of the next year. The greatest difficulties arose in the power plant, in addition to the lack of power, the Italian motors were not very reliable. The Air Force agreed to take the P.32 into limited service.
As it turned out, the design team did not manage to eliminate the most obvious shortcomings of the R.32, which resulted in several serious flight accidents, and as a result, the R.32 was decommissioned on April 12, 1938.
Armament. One 7.7 mm Breda-SAFAT machine gun in the nose turret and two machine guns of the same caliber in the retractable dorsal and ventral turrets, bomb load up to 1600 kg. With the turrets extended, the bomber was hopelessly losing its speed.
In the same year, a new version of the P.32-II bomber was developed, equipped with 14-cylinder Piaggio P.XI RC.40 engines with an output of 1020 hp. The contract dated June 13, 1938 provided for the construction of 12 aircraft, but only two P.32-IIs were built.
In parallel with the modernization, Giovanni Peña, who moved to Caproni at the end of 1936, developed another version of the bomber, designated the P.32bis. This work was carried out by order of the Air Force, which demanded to bring the maximum speed to 420 km / h, which required a change in the aerodynamics of the aircraft. Peña completely redesigned the bomber nose, tail unit and engine nacelles. Consideration of the project took place on March 26, 1936 and soon a contract was signed for the production of 32 bombers. In July, the construction of pre-production aircraft began, but in September the order was revised, reducing it to 16 aircraft.
The first prototype of the P.32bis took off on March 23, 1937. After the first flights, it turned out that the improved bomber had the same drawbacks as the conventional P.32, so the rest of the P.32bis series aircraft were abandoned, leaving only two specialized Ca variants. .405 "Procellaria".
By the beginning of World War II, not a single R.32 remained in the Italian Air Force, the history of such a promising aircraft ended so ingloriously.
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