Bugatti Fantastique

Flight Journal, Feb 2005 by Broze, Jay, Dietz, Jim

ON A BLUSTERY AUTUMN MORNING in 1939, at Le Bourget airport outside Paris, an exotic Bugatti Model 100 sits on the tarmac; it is the aircraft with which the French had hoped to capture the Coupe Deutsche de la Meurthe and set the world speed record.

The sleek airframe was designed by the Belgian aeronautical engineer Louis D. de Monge and featured two of Monsieur Bugatti's modified auto-racing engines buried in its "... things to come" fuselage. The straight-eight, dual-overhead camshaft engines had magnesium cylinder blocks and were designed to push 900hp to contra-rotating propellers by means of drive shafts that ran down along both sides of the recumbent pilot seat. Cooling for the powerplants was provided by radiators that were built into the airplane's Y-shaped empennage (which also housed the tailwheel).

Its design team predicted a top speed of more than 500mph. The French government, needing fighter planes, had set a 440mph benchmark. In March of 1939, the plane was under construction when a modified Heinkel He 100 raised the world record to 463.92mph. Then, on April 29, a Messerschmitt Me 209 V1 pushed it up to 469.22. Both were powered by Daimler-Benz engines. The summer of 1940 was to have seen Bugatti's finest hour, but after September 1939, Europe lost interest in speed records.

The French government urged Bugatti and de Monge to develop the fighter version of the little racing plane, but like all French aeronautical projects of that era, their progress was slow while that of the Germans was fast. The plane was taken from its furniture loft in Paris just before the Germans invaded and spent the Occupation hidden in a barn. It never flew.

Today, the Model 100 hangs in the EAA AirVenture Museum at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as a reminder of how the "World of tomorrow" looked in the last days of "Peace in our time."

-Jay Broze