The Reggiane Re.2007 was thought to be an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 fighter aircraft

Fighter aircraft

A fighter aircraft is a military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat with other aircraft, as opposed to a bomber, which is designed primarily to attack ground targets...

 designed in 1943 by Roberto Longhi.
Longhi himself spread the word on his design and construction of a jet aircraft prototype during the war.

Design

Roberto Longhi, one of the most prominent Reggiane

Reggiane

Officine Meccaniche Reggiane SpA was an Italian aircraft manufacturer, owned by Caproni and situated in Reggio Emilia, a city of what today is the Emilia-Romagna region...

 aircraft designers, in a letter to the Italian aviation magazine JP4, dated May 1976, stated that Regia Aeronautica

Regia Aeronautica

The Italian Royal Air Force was the name of the air force of the Kingdom of Italy. It was established as a service independent of the Royal Italian Army from 1923 until 1946...

 Major Antonio Ferri asked him to study an engine option for the Reggiane Re.2005

Reggiane Re.2005

The Reggiane Re.2005 was an Italian monoplane fighter/fighter-bomber produced for the Regia Aeronautica during the later years of World War II. It is considered by many to be "the most beautiful plane of the Second World War". Along with the Macchi C.202/C.205 and Fiat G.55, the Reggiane Re.2005...

. The requirement was to install a supplemental Fiat A.20

Fiat A.20

-References:* Angelucci, Enzo. World Encyclopedia of Military Aircraft. London:Jane's Publishing, 1981. ISBN 0-7106-0148-4.* Gunston, Bill. World Encyclopedia of Aero Engines. London:Guild Publishing, 1986....

 engine behind the cockpit, driving a compressor, in order to improve the Daimler-Benz DB 605

Daimler-Benz DB 605

|-See also:-Bibliography:* Gunston, Bill. World Encyclopedia of Aero Engines. Cambridge, England. Patrick Stephens Limited, 1989. ISBN 1-85260-163-9* Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War II. London. Studio Editions Ltd, 1989. ISBN 0-517-67964-7...

 main engine output, giving the airplane a speed of 750 kilometres per hour (382.7 kn) above 8000 metres (26,246.7 ft). It was also planned to use a tail exhaust to achieve more thrust.

The proposal was filed as Project R by Regia Aeronautica Stato Maggiore (HQ), but remained only a paper project, as, according to Longhi, the aircraft would have had problems with its center of gravity

Center of mass

In physics, the center of mass or barycenter of a system is the average location of all of its mass. In the case of a rigid body, the position of the center of mass is fixed in relation to the body...

.

One alternate possibility was to obtain turbojet engines from Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

, but despite requests from Antonio Alessio and Count Giovanni Battista Caproni

Giovanni Battista Caproni

Giovanni Battista Caproni , known as "Gianni" Caproni, was an Italian aeronautical engineer, civil engineer, electrical engineer, and aircraft designer who founded the Caproni aircraft-manufacturing company.-Early life and education:...

, the Germans delivered only a wooden mock-up for dimensional tests to Reggiane.

After the war, Longhi tried to conduct experiments with two Junkers Jumo 004

Junkers Jumo 004

The Jumo 004 was the world's first turbojet engine in production and operational use, and the first successful axial compressor jet engine ever built. Some 8,000 units were manufactured by Junkers in Germany during late World War II and powered the operational Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter,...

 engines that were left in Udine

Udine

Udine is a city and comune in northeastern Italy, in the middle of Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, between the Adriatic sea and the Alps , less than 40 km from the Slovenian border. Its population was 99,439 in 2009, and that of its urban area was 175,000.- History :Udine is the historical...

 airport after the German defeat. These extremely valuable jet engines were delivered to Italy in 1945 as spare parts for a small Luftwaffe

Luftwaffe

Luftwaffe is a generic German term for an air force. It is also the official name for two of the four historic German air forces, the Wehrmacht air arm founded in 1935 and disbanded in 1946; and the current Bundeswehr air arm founded in 1956....

 high speed reconnaissance

Reconnaissance

Reconnaissance is the military term for exploring beyond the area occupied by friendly forces to gain information about enemy forces or features of the environment....

 flight, equipped with three Arado Ar 234 Blitz

Arado Ar 234

The Arado Ar 234 was the world's first operational jet-powered bomber, built by the German Arado company in the closing stages of World War II. Produced in very limited numbers, it was used almost entirely in the reconnaissance role, but in its few uses as a bomber it proved to be nearly impossible...

, when the nearly impossible to intercept German twin-jet planes participated to the Italian Campaign

Italian Campaign (World War II)

The Italian Campaign of World War II was the name of Allied operations in and around Italy, from 1943 to the end of the war in Europe. Joint Allied Forces Headquarters AFHQ was operationally responsible for all Allied land forces in the Mediterranean theatre, and it planned and commanded the...

. Unfortunately for Reggiane's designers, the engines were purchased by Angelo Ambrosini, another Italian aircraft manufacturer.

Some Re.2007 drawings were made only after the war by airplane designer Pellizzola, but were not followed-up. Those Re.2007 drawings were based on a speculative reconstruction derived from a Reggiane engineer's description. The drawings were notable for the futuristic (for 1943) swept wing

Swept wing

A swept wing is a wing planform favored for high subsonic jet speeds first investigated by Germany during the Second World War. Since the introduction of the MiG-15 and North American F-86 which demonstrated a decisive superiority over the slower first generation of straight-wing jet fighters...

, which only became common on fighter planes in the 1950s, although the Germans had used them on both the Me262 jet and Me163 rocket fighters.

Rumours about a partially built airframe with technical sketches, both sent to the United Kingdom and the United States for studies, were published in some Italian books and magazines, but are now considered highly improbable.

Hoax

In his letters, Longhi said that he started in late 1943 a project for the Re.2007, a swept wing, jet-powered (Jumo 004) fighter build using the better part of the Re.2006 second prototype.
In 1968 Interconair Aviation & Marine published the first post-war study in the Reggiane fighter. The editors and publishers of the great "Profiles" series bought the story and produced a profile devoted to the Re 2007. Ing. Longhi says that he sent a letter to Count Caproni asking him to try to obtain the Jumo 004 turbojet engine via his political connections in Rome; according to Ing. Longhi’s letter a copy of this request should still be in Caproni Archive. As time goes by the war ended before having found the way to approach the problem with the German authorities.

For a couple of years nothing happened, but a surge of aviation nationalism in political nostalgics who pointed out that Italy also had a wartime jet-powered fighter after CC.2 experiment. Then, the details given by Longhi started to work against him and a rain of letters and witnesses started to pour in the Italian specialty press.

In the relatively little Reggiane environment it would have been impossible to hide such an important project and no designer or technician or test pilot remembered anything about it.
The drawings and technical description were done after the war. The technical description, dated January 7, 1944, is written on Reggiane official paper but it is the type of paper used by Reggiane in the post-war years. The drawings were done by Mr. Cometti and, as stated by Mr. Cometti himself, they were done immediately after the end of the war in Europe.
The last straw was the demonstration that the Longhi letter to Count Caproni was a vulgar fake: it was written using the letterheaded paper used by Reggiane after the war.

Also the technical specifications are suspect, given the engine power and the weight of the aircraft. The aircraft is too futuristic for a 1943 design. Also, it seems clear that the Re.2007 could not have been based on the Re.2006. A quick look on the cross-section indicates it was impossible to use a RE 2006 frame for a Jumo 004 of which Longhi did not know the exact specifications. The wing is different, due to the arrowed and sweeped profile, and the fuselage is designed to fit a turbojet engine, quite different from a piston engine. So the opinion that the Re.2006 prototype was used for the Re.2007 prototype is very unlikely.

The reason for Longhi's fabricated story was probably to get credibility in the West. Returned in the States, Ing. Longhi was able to develop the Re.2008 from the new Re.2007 sketches he made after the war but pretended were from earlier days. The Re.2008 models (1947–1948) were tested at Cornell Variable Density Wind Tunnel in 1949. The definitive collapse of Caproni Group stopped all evolutions.

Specifications