Bear with me for a few moments while I tell you a tale of my homeland. Or don't, it really makes no difference.

In 1912, Giulio Macchi (1866-1935), an Italian aeronautical engineer who lived and worked in Varese (in Lombardia northern Italia, about 45km north west of Milano), founded a company called Società Anonima Nieuport-Macchi to build Nieuport aircraft under license. (Nieuport was a French manufacturer of sporting aircraft and, later, military aircraft. It existed from 1908 to 1937.)

By 1916 they started producing their own designs. In 1924 the company was renamed Aeronautica Macchi, and started producing racing seaplanes. It built a couple of fighter models in World War II, but after the war turned its attentions to creating (principally) trainers and light ground attack aircraft. It created 15 such models between 1948 and 2005 (as well as a bunch of motorcycles for good measure).

In 2003 it was merged into Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica Group to become Alenia Aermacchi, which in turn was moved into Leonardo S.p.A. which is based in Roma. As indeed is only appropriate. But that said, Leonardo's aerospace activities are so broad, and so mixed with joint ventures, that you really can't detect the "DNA" of Macchi in the group any longer.

But let's return to the glory days of the 1950s. Macchi produced a rather nice little single engined turbojet called the MB-326 which first flew on 10 December 1957, and was introduced in February 1962. (It was produced between 1961 and 1975, with about 800 being made for various international customers.)

I'll talk about the design specs in an upcoming image, but for the moment let's talk about this airframe.

The RAAF acquired 87 as two seat advanced jet trainers, and 10 were acquired by the Royal Australian Navy. 12 of those were Italian built, and 85 were built under licence by our old friends the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (see a bunch of previous images) under the designation CA-30.

This aircraft is painted as A7-025 from 25 (City of Perth) Squadron. It's neither.

This is in fact A7-066 which was built as a CA-30. Its first flight was on 31 October 1969, and it served with 2 Flying Training School, and later (possibly from 19 May 1999) with 79 Squadron which had been reformed (for the third time) as a training squadron based at RAAF Pearce north of Perth. (The Museum's home page claims that it was with 76 Squadron at Williamtown NSW), but the 79 squadron information comes from adf-serials.com.au, which tracks aircraft serial number by serial number.)

However the wings are from another machine, specifically A7-009.

25 Squadron is a reserve squadron which is also based in Pearce, and has a black swan as its logo. It did operate some of the MB-326s in 1989, just not this one. I suspect it was chosen just to honour the location of the museum.

Addendum: My personal opinion is that Facebook is a sociopathic organisation that steals other peoples' intellectual property (including the images in this gallery) despite being explicitly denied permission to do so.