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by Aeromedia - corso Giambone 46/18 - 10135 Torino (Italy)

Leonardo Aircraft Seniores' Voluntary Branch set up their Turin's Centro Documentazione Storica

On October 24, 2017, Luciano Bertolo led a group of Volunteers and two Leonardo managers to inspect disused offices of the Turin plant where for years he had stored a large quantity of documents and drawings otherwise destined for pulping. Most of these referred to programmes of the 'Fifties such as FIAT G.82 and G.91, and to lesser known activities such as the design of the Concorde wing and of parts of the Raytheon Hawk ground-to-air missile.

The inspection continued inside the small "Archivio A" (40 m2) filled with superseded technical publications related to programmes such as the F-104, Tornado, the Eurofighter prototypes, C-27J and ATR 42MP. Five more temporary storage areas in other buildings of the plant were visited later the same day.

As a consequence the company made available some empty offices on the ground floor of Building 12, the "Palazzina Centrale", intercommunicating with other offices at the first floor. This area has been earmarked to progressively host all the technical documentation currently located at various locations on the premises.

The new infrastructure has been aptly baptized as the "Centro Documentazione Storica". (Historical Document Centre). During the 1960's, when FIAT Aviazione suppressed the company nursery school, Piero Vergnano (at that time the External Relations manager) reused the small abandoned building, surrounded by a garden, to set up the original "Centro Documentazione Storica". This remained active until July 1993 when the External Relations Office was virtually disbanded. At this point Vergnano found himself without staff to carry out the task and resigned.

The activities of the Seniores' Volunteer Branch are now increased with the addition of the Turin Historical Documentation Centre to the activities already ongoing at the aircraft exhibition area of Caselle.

In the picture: a general view of the main "secret vault" set up by Luciano Bertolo in Building 16 (officially "unusable" but still equipped with electrical power). Along the second floor hallway there are three former offices filled with historical material. "Block X" and "Block Y" (an intercommunicating 250 m2) contain technical publications and documents, paper tracings and film-based drawings related to the aviation programmes from the 1950's and on. This documentation includes superseded publications from Leonardo's Logistic Support archives in Turin, the (formerly Aerfer) Pomigliano Logistic Support Archives and the Turin Central Archive. (Aeromedia)

(Aeromedia, October 2017)