The star-crossed history of the most beautiful aircraft ever.

The prospects for the 1939 Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe air race did not look good. Suzanne Deutsch de la Meurthe, the widow of the “Oil King of France” Henri, had revived the competition in 1931 in memory of her late husband. The new Coupe would eventually run from the years 1933 through 1936 and it tested pilots and aircraft for speed over two, gruelling 1000 kilometre stages. In the 1936 race, winning times were off and participation was down. The next competition was eventually scheduled for 1939, but like much of the future in Europe at the time, the particulars of the event were uncertain; a hopeful dream in an increasingly hopeless time.

The upcoming race did not go unnoticed, however, by the Italian-born, naturalized French citizen Ettore Bugatti, the designer and manufacturer of cars of considerable reputation for both luxury and performance. Bugatti founded his eponymous car company just before World War I in Molsheim, in what was Germany at the time. After the war, Bugatti picked up where he left off except that Molsheim was now located in France as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. Bugatti grasped early the idea that success in high profile sports car races could be translated into sales in the showroom. Bugatti cars were successful in the nascent Grand Prix circuit of the 1920s and at the Le Mans 24 hour endurance race in the late 1930s. Long before the term was coined, Bugatti embodied the philosophy that you “win on Sunday and sell on Monday.” Bugatti road cars of that era are still paragons of automotive design and highly sought after by collectors.

In the late pre-war period, however, it was German aircraft—not just cars—that were gaining a reputation for being the fastest and having the most advanced technology. The nouveau French nationalist Bugatti took this as a personal challenge; to come up with an aircraft which could not only match the German designs, but far exceed their capabilities in every way. As a result, Bugatti turned his attention and entrepreneurial talent to an aircraft that he would enter in the 1939 Coupe. It would fly against German aircraft and the best offerings from around the world. Bugatti set out to design what was to be no ordinary, modest advancement on the state of the art, but a radical new aircraft that employed a wide range of new, advanced technologies. Never mind that he had never previously designed any aircraft. To help realize this dream, therefore, Bugatti retained the services of Louis de Monge, a Belgian aeronautical engineer of no modest reputation himself and with whom Bugatti had collaborated previously.

It appears as though Bugatti and de Monge started with the idea that the exterior appearance should fully embrace every notion of The Future as seen from the optimistic perspective of the 1930s. To say that the aircraft they visualized was simply nicely designed entirely misses the point. It is a design icon that deserves to be considered along with other examples like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and Mies van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair, which were also designed in the same period. Like those designs, the Bugatti aircraft looked more like it was immaculately conceived and then emerged fully formed from the firmament, much as Michelangelo spoke of the sculpture being released from the raw block of stone. It was as if the first, slightly exaggerated, conceptual Art Deco sketch was realized, without any compromise, through to the finished aircraft precisely as the sketchers had feverishly dreamed. The smooth, organic, compound curves would prove mind-numbingly difficult to build, but there was no aesthetic compromise countenanced at this or any stage of the design.

The fuselage of the aircraft scribes out one pure, streamlined, uninterrupted arc from nose to tail. Even the cockpit canopy does not deviate from the silhouette, in an appearance much more in keeping with modern sailplanes than aircraft of that day. The wings are sharply tapered and slightly elliptical from root to tip. They are swept forward rather than projecting straight outwards from the fuselage or swept slightly aft as was typical for the time. The tail was also a dramatic departure from the norm, using a ‘V’ arrangement to initially eliminate one stabilizing surface. But even in that decision Bugatti did not compromise, flattening the V slightly to 120 degrees as opposed to retaining the geometrically more obvious 90 that might be expected. He did this for no better reason, it seems, than aesthetics. A small, ventral fin was added to balance the appearance of the tail when the aircraft was viewed from the side. It turned the V-tail into a Y-tail, of a sort, the lower extent of which also served double duty as a strut for the tail wheel. It’s part of the magic of the design that so many things have multiple roles without any of them seeming forced.

In the final exterior design you can easily imagine Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famed French aviator and author, was looking at the Bugatti when he said “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Succinctly stated, the aircraft was a prescient, hauntingly beautiful form plucked mysteriously from some bright, imaginary future.

Ironically, it was to be known simply as the Bugatti 100P.

Bugatti was at his core an entrepreneur and certainly not one to miss an excellent co-branding opportunity. He included Bugatti automative engines in the 100P design from the outset—just like race cars, exciting planes are a great way to “sell on Monday”. The use of Bugatti engines was the basis for the first major technical innovation of the 100P design. Bugatti and de Monge quickly realized that a single, supercharged, eight litre, straight-8 Bugatti engine—even one with 450 horspower—was not going to meet their performance goal of 500 miles per hour for the finished aircraft. There was a loophole in the Coupe rules, however—there was an upper limit to the size of the engine for entrant aircraft, but surprisingly, no limit to the total number.

Bugatti and de Monge seized on the somewhat dubious opportunity and a second, identical Bugatti engine was added to the design, but only in a manner so as to not alter the aircraft’s appearance. The two engines were crammed into the same fuselage profile, both behind the pilot, one in front of the other. They had to be canted noticeably outwards, in opposite directions, so that the propellor drive shafts would clear the pilot on their way forward to the nose. The engines each drove their own propellor but turning opposite directions on the same axis—what is now known as a contra-rotating arrangement. It is a configuration which makes the propellors more efficient, and also eliminates the tendency for the torque of a single propellor to rotate the airframe in the opposite direction. Once again, at least two problems solved with one physical device.

Keeping 900 total horsepower at a reasonable operating temperature necessitated sufficient cooling airflow over the internally-mounted radiators. Again, there was to be no compromise to the overall shape of the aircraft and air intake ducts were incorporated into the leading edge of the V-tail surfaces, an area of high dynamic air pressure. The air was then ducted forward—opposite to the direction of flight—into a progressively larger chamber so that when the airflow finally passed over the radiator it was moving at a speed most efficient for heat transfer. The heated air was then discharged into a low pressure area just aft of the wing. Bugatti and de Monge calculated that all the necessary cooling air could be circulated in this manner without additional blowers or fans.

The landing gear was designed to be retractable ostensibly for performance reasons. Without a doubt in the case of the 100P, it was also so that when viewed in the air the aircraft’s exceptionally clean lines would not be adulterated by fixed landing gear protruding into the airstream. Such a compromise would have been unthinkable for Bugatti and de Monge.

Finally, using a technique that foreshadowed control systems only used decades later, a patented ‘split’ flap was incorporated, the two halves of which could be operated independently of each other. Moving them both in the same direction up or down changed the wing shape to provide a controlling effect. Moving them in opposite directions, one up one down, would have a braking effect, necessary for an airplane with such a clean, streamlined shape to slow for landing. But the innovation didn’t stop there. The designers must have felt that the operation of the complex flap design would prove too much for most pilots. As a result, they designed a mechanism to operate them automatically, in response to sensed flight conditions. Although analog rather than digital, it was a rudimentary flight control computer, once again, years ahead of its time.

With the aesthetic and technical design complete, construction of the aircraft began, modestly, on the second floor of a furniture factory in Paris in 1938. In order to meet the rules of the Coupe Deutsch de la Meurthe, the 100P had to be finished by September of 1939. It quickly became clear they were not going to make it but that would prove to be a moot point in the end. Fate in the form of world events intervened and on September 1st, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and for the next six years, the world descended into a harsh darkness with little appetite for frivolous racing planes and sports cars. In June of 1940, as the German army approached Paris, Ettore Bugatti disassembled the unfinished 100P and fled with it to the countryside. The aircraft was hidden in a barn where it was to remain, virtually unnoticed, for the next 30 years.

With Ettore’s death in 1947 after the war’s end and with no living heir, the Bugatti name was for the most part consigned to history. The 100P was largely forgotten. It was eventually re-discovered and purchased by a restorer of Bugatti cars who sacriligiously stripped out the original engines which were still bolted into their original positions. The remaining airframe crossed the Atlantic and passed through a number of hands and efforts to restore it. It eventually was entrusted to the good offices of the Experimental Aircraft Association where it finally received the attention it deserved and made ready for static display. Through the ravages of 30 years in the French countryside, there was never any thought of the original 100P being once again airworthy. So much of the potential of the aircraft could therefore never be proven out. The original 100P, now painted in Bugatti’s signature French Racing Blue, can still be seen at the EAA AirVenture Museum at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

In 1973, Scotty Wilson, a highly experienced pilot from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma was reading the October issue of Air Progress when he came across an article entitled The Discovery of the Lost Bugatti. It detailed the story of the 100P and until he finally retired some 30 years later, Wilson could not shake the memory of that article. He correctly described the Bugatti as “the most historically significant airplane that never flew” and eventually felt compelled to try and re-create it. He was determined to stick to the original design as faithfully as possible, changing only what was absolutely necessary to meet modern safety standards. Thus began the Rêve Bleu (Blue Dream) project, an international team Wilson led and dedicated to finally realizing the original designers’ vision. Despite the fact that few working plans had survived and a host of other significant obstacles, construction of an entirely new 100P commenced in 2009.

Wilson visited the AirVenture museum on a number of occasions to take dimensions off the original aircraft and precisely incorporate them into the replica. A disappointing—although thoroughly correct—decision was made to replace the virtually unobtainable Bugatti engines of the original 100P with Suzuki Hyabusa motorcycle engines. Wilson retained their unique configuration, however, locating both of the engines behind the pilot’s position, canted in opposite directions, one in front of the other exactly like the original. Japanese precision design and manufacturing resulted in highly reliable power plants with an extraordinary power-to-weight ratio. Watching the videos of the finished aircraft, though, one does wonder how the beautiful racket of the Bugatti engines would have sounded as compared to the muted scream of their thoroughly modern, motorcycle cousins.

The construction effort, privately funded and even including a successful Kickstarter campaign to contribute additional funds, continued for six years and involved tens of thousands of hours of work. Virtually every part was made by hand much like the original. Triumphantly, the finished aircraft first flew in August of 2015. At the end of that brief first flight, however, a failure of the right wheel brake sent the aircraft into the weeds next to the runway. The 100P tipped up onto its nose, abruptly stopping both engines. The damage was relatively minor and another successful test flight was undertaken in October of that same year. While much remained to be proved out, it was clear at this point that the new 100P was at least capable of basic flight.

Fate had already intervened a number of times to derail the original Bugatti aircraft project. Tragically, there was yet another cruel turn in the story that lay in store as the test flying of the Rêve Bleu continued in August of 2016. In what was otherwise a routine flight the aircraft suddenly banked sharply to the left and dove nearly straight down into a bean field near Burns Flat, Oklahoma. Scotty Wilson was killed instantly and what remained of the Bugatti burned on the spot where it had impacted. The accident, at the time of this writing, is still under investigation and no specific cause has yet been determined.

Bugatti and de Monge’s revolutionary design did eventually fly, of course, as a direct result of the Rêve Bleu project. From that perspective, the project was a success. However, the potential that had been visualized 75 years earlier was never proven out—whether it would ever have achieved the 500 miles per hour the designers intended will remain a tantalizing mystery. With a magnificent effort like the Rêve Bleu coming to such a tragic, frustrating conclusion it’s hard to imagine that we will ever know the true potential of this remarkable aircraft. That said, the Bugatti 100P continues to fascinate and beguile so many both inside and outside the aviation community. Perhaps there is still someone out there, with a passion for the aircraft and the age it so aptly represented, who will be compelled to see Bugatti’s futuristic dream in the air, where it no doubt belongs, and take its rightful place in history.

There is, on the other hand, a kind of poetry about the Bugatti 100P remaining a beautiful, enduring mystery; un rêve bleu of a simpler and more elegant time.

©2016 Terence C. Gannon

If you prefer, you can listen to this essay as a podcast. This article previously appeared on Medium on August 24, 2016. I welcome your comments below. If you enjoyed this article, I would appreciate it if you could share it with your social networks. (header photo: The Bugatti 100P by Scotty Wilson of the Rêve Bleu project. This is dedicated to his memory.)