out the test flights. He thus joined his elder brother, Federico (who had graduated from the Bocconi University of Milan shortly before), and asked the Arma del Genio (the military engineering corps of the Esercito Italiano) for permission to settle at the cascina of Malpensa, in semi-desert area which at the time was in use as a training ground for the cavalry. The permission was granted and so, after building a hangar close to the cascina, on 5 April 1910, the two Caproni brothers and their collaborators, Ernesto "Ernestin" Gaias and Ernesto "Erneston" Contrini from Arco, moved to Malpensa. The parts of the Ca.1 that had already been assembled were transported from Arco to Ala on carriages, and then reached Gallarate by train; their journey started on 8 April and ended in Malpensa on 11 April. The four men were going to spend one year living in primitive accommodation and working in the hangar, which also served as a workshop. There were no comforts and the project of building and flying the Ca.1 was very demanding from both a technical and financial point of view. However, Caproni was later to think back to the first period he spent in Maplensa as a time of happiness and peace of mind. The aircraft was assembled in a few weeks, but Caproni still had to find an engine and a pilot. He tried to solve the first problem by buying an engine built by the recently founded Miller company of Turin; the engine wasn't expensive and the Trentine engineer was glad to use an Italian-built piece of technology, because of his irredentist sentiments; however, the four-cylinder W engine proved quite unreliable and was apparently unable to run smoothly for more than a few minutes at a time. As far as the second problem was concerned, Caproni decided to have Ugo Tabacchi, a Veronese-born Trentine chauffeur who had recently joined Caproni's team, pilot the maiden flight of his aircraft. Although some licensed pilots (mostly trained on Wright aircraft) were already available in Italy, Caproni couldn't afford to hire any of them. The aircraft was ready for the first test flight in May 1910. Design The Caproni Ca.1 was a light single-engine biplane featuring an uncovered rectangular truss as a fuselage, two unstaggered mainplanes of equal span, a biplane tailplane and a twin-propeller pulling configuration. The fuselage was composed of a long rectangular truss; the