Piaggio

The Piaggio Avanti flies on a three-surface layout patented in 1982, and both of the aircraft carrying that configuration here are out of production.

The Avanti's layout was patented in 1982 by chief engineer Alessandro Mazzoni: three lifting surfaces — a wing, a conventional tail and a small foreplane — with the two turboprops mounted behind the wing as pushers. The prototype flew at Genoa in September 1986 and Italian certification followed in 1990. Genoa remained the site of final assembly. Piaggio Aerospace entered extraordinary administration in 2018 and passed to the Turkish group Baykar in 2025. The aeroplane has outlasted several of the corporate arrangements built around it, which tends to happen to a design nothing else replaces.

Both Piaggio aircraft in this fleet are Avantis, and the distance between them is short: 1,470 nautical miles against 1,510, 177 inches of cabin against 179. The Avanti II is the later of the two. Neither has been built for some years. That is the entire Piaggio presence: one aeroplane held at two points in its own development, kept in the fleet because the configuration does something a substitution does not reproduce. Anyone choosing here is choosing the layout first and the variant afterwards, in that order.