Umberto Nobile (1926)

Umberto Nobile (January 21, 1885 – July 30, 1978) was an Italian aeronautical engineer and Arctic explorer. Nobile was a developer and promoter of semi-rigid airships during the Golden Age of Aviation between the two World Wars. He is primarily remembered for designing and piloting the airship Norge, which may have been the first aircraft to reach the North Pole, and which was indisputably the first to fly across the polar ice cap from Europe to America. Nobile also designed and flew the Italia, a second polar airship; this second expedition ended in a deadly crash and provoked an international rescue effort.

Early career

Born in Lauro, in the southern Italian province of Avellino, Nobile graduated from the University of Naples with degrees in both electrical and industrial engineering. In 1906 he began working for the Italian state railways, where he worked on electrification of the rail system. In 1911 his interests turned to the field of aeronautical engineering, and he enrolled in a one-year course offered by the Italian Army. Nobile had always been fascinated by the work of airship pioneers such as Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin. When Italy entered World War I in 1915, the then 29-year-old attempted three times to enlist, but was rejected as physically unfit for service.

Commissioned in the Italian air force, Nobile spent the war overseeing airship construction and developing new designs. The Italian military had already used airships as early as 1912, during the Italo-Turkish War, for bombing and reconnaissance. Italy built about 20 M-class semi-rigid airships with a bomb load of 1000 kg which it used for bombing and anti-shipping missions. The Italians also used other, smaller airships, some of them British-built. None of Nobile's designs flew until after the war.

In July 1918, Nobile formed a partnership with the engineers Giuseppe Valle,Benedetto Croce and Celestino Usuelli, which they called the Aeronautical Construction Factory. During this period he also lectured at the University of Naples, obtained his test pilot's license and wrote the textbook Elementi di Aerodinamica (Elements of Aerodynamics). He became convinced that medium sized, semi-rigid airships were superior to non-rigid and rigid designs. The company's first project was the Airship T-34, which was designed for a trans-Atlantic crossing. When the British R34 crossed the Atlantic in 1919, Nobile and his partners sold the T-34 to the Italian military. Later the U.S. Army acquired the ship, and commissioned it as the Roma. The Roma ultimately crashed in Langley, Virginia in 1922, killing 34.

That same year, in the face of political instability and threats to nationalize his company, Nobile traveled to the U.S. work as a consultant for Goodyear in Akron, Ohio. He returned to Italy in 1923 and began construction of a new airship, the N-1. He was also caught up in a web of political and professional intrigue with competitors and detractors. His principal antagonists seem to have been General Gaetano Arturo Crocco, a competing airship manufacturer, and General Italo Balbo, chief of the air force general staff, who sought to develop Italy's air fleet with heavier-than-air craft rather than the airships Nobile designed.

Polar expeditions

Col. Umberto Nobile, designer of the "Norge" watching her departure from the base at Spitsbergen, from forward control car

Norge

In 1925 Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen sought out Nobile to collaborate on a flight to the North Pole - still at that time an unreached goal for aviators - using one of Nobile's craft. Amundsen had previously flown to within 150 nautical miles (280 km) of the North Pole, piloting a pair amphibious aircraft along with the American millionaire-adventurer Lincoln Ellsworth, but their planes were forced to land and the two men were trapped on the ice for 30 days. The Italian Navy, which had built Nobile's N-1, made it available for the expedition March 29 1926; Nobile re-christened it Norge (Norway). On April 14 the airship left for Leningrad in Russia, on its way towards its Arctic jumping-off point,Ny-Ålesund (Kings Bay), near Spitsbergen, Norway.

On May 9, as they prepared to depart, the Norge expedition members were dismayed to hear reports that Americans Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett had beaten them to their goal, overflying the Pole before them in a Fokker F-VII. Nevertheless, the Norge crew pressed ahead with their flight.

On May 11, 1926, the Norge expedition left Spitsbergen. The ship flew over the Pole and landed two days later in Teller, Alaska; strong winds had made a return to Norway impossible. In retrospect, the Norge crew may actually have achieved their aim of being the first to overfly the Pole: Byrd's May 9 flight, acclaimed for decades as the prestigious first Polar flyover, has since been subjected to several credible challenges, and it is not known whether he successfully reached the Pole first, as he claimed.

The Norge "Rome to Nome" flight was acclaimed as another great milestone in flight, but disagreement soon erupted between Nobile, the pilot, and Amundsen, the expedition leader, as to who deserved greater credit for the expedition. The controversy was exacerbated by Mussolini's government, which trumpeted the genius of Italian engineering and ordered Nobile on a speaking tour of the U.S., further alienating Amundsen and the Norwegians. He was famously seen off from the Baltic port city of Stolp by a group of friends who had travelled all the way from Milan to wish him luck on his departure.

Italia

Despite the controversy, Nobile continued to maintain good relations with other polar scientists, and he started planning a new expedition, this time fully under Italian control. Nobile's company managed to sell an N-class airship to Japan; however, relations between Nobile and his competitors in the fascist government were hostile, and he and his staff were subjected to threats and intimidation. Nobile's popularity with the public meant he was, for the moment, safe from direct attack. When the plans for his next expedition were announced, Italo Balbo is said to have commented, "Let him go, for he cannot possibly come back to bother us anymore."

The N-class airship Italia was slowly completed and equipped for Polar flight during 1927-28. Part of the difficulty was in raising private funding to cover the costs of the expedition; the Italian government limited its direct participation to sending the aging steamer Città di Milano as a support vessel to Spitsbergen, under the command of Giuseppe Romagna.^[1]

On May 23, 1928, after two preliminary flights from Ny-Ålesund (Kings Bay), the Italia commenced its flight to the North Pole with Nobile as both pilot and expedition leader. On May 24, the ship reached the Pole and had already turned back toward Norway when it ran into a storm. On May 25, the Italia crashed onto the pack ice less than 30 kilometres north of Spitsbergen. Of the 16 men in the crew, ten were thrown onto the ice; the remaining six crewmen and six were trapped as the lightened ship swept the intact gondola skyward; the ship then exploded, killing all six. One of the ten men on the ice died from the impact; Nobile and another crew member suffered broken legs, and another a broken shoulder.^[2]. The crew managed to salvage several items from the crashed airship, including a radio transmitter, a red tent, and, critically, packages of food which quick-witted engineer Ettore Arduino had managed to throw onto the ice before he was carried off to his death by the lifting aircraft. As the days passed, the drifting sea ice took the survivors towards Foyn and Broch islands.

In the wake of the crash, a collection of nations, including Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Italy, launched the first polar air rescue effort. Several privately owned ships which had been chartered by polar scientists and explorers also participated. Even Roald Amundsen put aside his past differences with Nobile and boarded a seaplane headed for the rescue headquarters; his plane disappeared en route, and though a pontoon from the craft was later found, Amundsen' body was not.

Controversial rescue

After a month of privation for the Italia survivors, the first rescue plane, a Swedish airforce Fokker ski plane, piloted by Lieutenant Einar Lundborg landed near the crash site. Nobile had prepared a detailed evacuation plan, with the most seriously wounded men at the top of the list. However Lundborg refused to take anyone but Nobile. He argued that the plane could only take one survivor and the other seriously injured man was so heavy Lundborg was unsure he could take off.^[3] Nobile was airlifted to Ryss Island, base camp of Swedish and Finnish air rescue efforts. When Lundborg returned to pick up a second survivor he crashed his plane on landing, and was trapped with the others.

Eventually, Nobile reached the Città di Milano where, he later said, he was dismayed at the incompetence he found. His attempts to help co-ordinate the international rescue effort were blocked, and when he threatened to leave he was placed under virtual arrest by Captain Romagna. His telegrams to the survivors still on the ice, as well as to various people involved in the rescue, were heavily censored, and he was forced to sign a communique implying that his own evacuation was a sign of cowardice. Eventually the rest of his crew were rescued by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin. Nobile insisted that he wanted to continue the search for six crew who were swept away by the airship when it disintegrated, but he was ordered back to Rome with the others.

Two hundred thousand cheering Italians met Nobile and his crew on arrival in Rome. This show of popularity was unexpected by Nobile's detractors, who had been seeding the foreign and domestic press with accusations against him. An aggrieved Nobile was not shy about his complaints; in an interview with Benito Mussolini, he offended the dictator by detailing his grievances at length. The official inquiry and the embarrassment over the crash gave Nobile's enemies the chance they were looking for: blame for the disaster was placed on his shoulders, and he was accused of abandoning his men on the ice - charges he would spend the rest of his life trying to dispel. In protest of the findings, Nobile resigned from the air force in March 1929. He faced a further trial with the death of his wife in 1930.

Later career

In 1931, Nobile left Italy to work in the Soviet Union, where he helped with the Soviet semi-rigid airship programme. Details of the Soviet Airship Program remain obscure, but there is an obvious Nobile influence in the design of the airships USSR-V5, and URSS W6 Ossoawiachim. He was allowed to return to Italy to teach in 1936, before going to the United States in 1939 to teach aeronautics at Lewis University in Lockport, Illinois. When Italy went to war with the United States, he was permitted to remain in the US despite his enemy alien status. He returned home in 1943, after Italy surrendered to Allied forces, to see to the safety of his children.

In 1945 the Italian air force cleared Nobile of all charges related to the Italia crash, and promoted him to the rank of major general. He was persuaded to run for the Constituent Assembly, but once elected was accused of being a communist on the basis of his five years working in the Soviet Union. He returned to his beloved University of Naples where he taught, and wrote of his adventures, until his retirement.

He died in Rome on July 30, 1978.

See also

• List of explorers
• List of firsts
• Timeline of hydrogen technologies

External links

• Umberto Nobile - The North Pole Flights
• Fathom Archive An interview with Umberto Nobile about N-1 Norge and Roma airships

References

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