Piel CP-10 Pinocchio
The Piel CP-10 Pinocchio is a small French post-war sport aircraft and the first Claude Piel design to fly. It started a long line of Piel light aircraft and is often called Pinocchio, though it is different from his CP-20 Pinocchio.
It is a Pou du Ciel–style, single-seat, tandem-wing aircraft built by Claude Piel with Roger Holleville. It uses a 19 kW (25 hp) Mengin B flat-twin engine mounted in the nose with the cylinder heads exposed for cooling, turning a two-blade propeller. The forward wing is the larger wing, mounted high above the fuselage on each side by two short inverted-V struts. The wing’s angle of incidence is adjusted from the open cockpit by long rods connected to the lower fuselage. The smaller rear wing sits on top of the fuselage just behind the cockpit.
The CP-10 has a straight-edged fin and a rounded, balanced rudder. Its fixed undercarriage features a tailwheel, with each main wheel on a hinged V-strut to the lower fuselage and a shock absorber on a strut to the upper fuselage.
The CP-10 Pinocchio’s first flight was on 25 September 1948 at Moisselles, but it was damaged in an accident there on 17 January 1949.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 13:10 (CET).