Aviation appeared to offer Italy a technological field on which established powers held no inherited advantage. Effective advocates used that sense of possibility to promote sweeping visions of future air power. Giulio Douhet's later image of bombers carrying 100 tons represents the scale of those expectations. The Regia Marina's common Macchi L.1 could carry only about 50 kilograms of bombs, while even the wartime Handley Page O/100 remained below a ton. Rapid early improvement made extraordinary growth appear plausible. Doctrine based on distant technical forecasts still had to be tested against the payload, range, and production limits of machines that actually existed.
Notable Point · 29:53-35:30
Italian airpower vision versus payload reality
Italian airpower theorists imagined enormous bomber forces while contemporary naval aircraft could carry only tiny fractions of the predicted loads.