Umberto Nobile

Interesting Trivia:

• Made it to General in the Italian Air Force during WWI, but did not serve in active duty
• Was well known for his aeronautical engineering
• Developed and promoted the semi-rigid airships
• Designed and piloted the airship “Norge”, the first airship to fly across the polar ice cap from Europe to America
• Wrote the textbook Elementi di Aerodinamica (Elements of Aerodynamics)

His Story:

His education was finished with degrees from the University of Naples, in both electrical and industrial engineering.

It was not until 1911 that his interest changed to aeronautical engineering when he enrolled in a one-year course offered by the Italian Army. The previous five years, he had worked for the Italian State Railways.

He very much wanted to take part in World War I but was refused three times, due to being physically unfit for service.  He was then commissioned into the Italian Air Force, his job entailed overseeing and development of airship design and construction. None of Nobile’s designs was used in the war itself.

After the war, while lecturing at the University of Naples, he formed a partnership with the engineers Giuseppe Valle, Benedetto Croce and CelestinoUsuelli and set up the Aeronautical Construction Factory. Meanwhile, he also qualified as a test pilot. Convinced that a medium sized, semi-rigid airship would be superior to the non-rigid and rigid designs, their first project was an Airship that would be able to fly the Atlantic.  However, the British Airship R34 beat them to it and they sold their Airship T-34 to the Italian military and was later sold on to the US Army. Unfortunately, the “Roma” as it was named, crashed in Langley, Virginia in 1922, causing the deaths of 34 people.

Nobile worked in the US for a couple of years, as a consultant for Goodyear but returned to Italy in 1923.  He immediately started the construction of a new airship, the N-1.

It was not until 1925, when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen asked Nobile to collaborate on a flight to the North Pole, something which had not been achieved before.  They were to use Nobile’s Airships, the N-1, which was made available by the Italian Navy who had actually built the ship.  The ship was appropriately renamed “Norge”.

While they were preparing to depart, news reached them that they were beaten in their goal to be the first to overfly the Pole as the Americans Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett achieved this in a Fokker F-VII. But they were determined to go ahead and on May 11^th, 1926, they left from Ny-Ålesund (Kings Bay), near Spitsbergen, Norway. Two days later they reached Teller, Alaska, having overflown the Pole.  Interestingly enough, Byrd’s and Bennett’s achievement have since been subjected to several credible challenges, so Nobile and Amundsen really might have been the first to make the flight.

Their success was overshadowed as Amundsen and Nobile fell out.  The flight had been a great achievement in aviation and disagreement erupted as to who deserved greater credit for the expedition. The world press had a field day in publishing their dispute.

Mussolini’s Government added fuel to the flames in claiming the genius of Italian engineering.  They ordered Nobile to go on a speaking tour of the US, which did not help relationships with the Norwegians.

Nobile planned his next expedition, this time with the N-class airship “Italia”.  Raising funds for this expedition proved difficult and even the Italian Government did not want to invest directly.  They did, however, sent a steamer to Spitsbergen as a support vessel. On 23^rd May, 1928, Nobile set off, again from Ny-Ålesund (Kings Bay), near Spitsbergen, Norway, this time as both pilot and expedition leader.  The flight ended in disaster.  They were already on their way back when the airship was caught in a storm and crashed. Six men died when the ship exploded, the other 10 crewmembers were thrown overboard onto the ice, sustaining serious injuries, with one of them dying on impact.  An international polar air rescue effort was started, including nations such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Italy.  Search and rescue missions were also started by several privately owned ships.

The rescue of the stranded men was haunted by tragedy.  The Swedish pilot Einar Lundborg, who first spotted the men, would only evacuate Nobile as he argued that the plane could not take a heavier passenger, even though the man was badly injured.  Lundborg flew Nobile to Ryss Island and returned to the stranded men, only to crash his plane on landing.  Nobile wanted to assist with co-ordinating the rescue mission but was shocked by the incompetence and hindrance he encountered. He also wanted to look for the six that he believed might still be alive.  His expression of his grievances went so far that he was placed under arrest and he was forced to sign a communique implying that his own evacuation was a sign of cowardice. Luckily, his crew was rescued by the Soviet icebreaker “Krasin”, seven weeks after crashing.

The other tragedy was that one of the participants of the search and rescue mission, Roald Amundsen, who had decided to put aside his past differences with Nobile, went missing with his plane, never to be found again.

Arriving back in Italy he was cheered by two hundred thousand, but an official awaited him.  He had offended dictator Mussolini when he complained to him.  This was what his enemies, who resented his popularity, had been waiting for – he was blamed for the disaster and was accused of abandoning his men on the ice.  As a protest against the findings of an official inquiry, Nobile resigned from the Italian Air Force in 1929.

In 1931, he decided to leave Italy for the Soviet Union, where he designed further semi-rigid airships.  In 1936, he returned to Italy and teaching where he wrote a book “I can tell the truth” in which he argued his innocence in the “Italy” disaster. In 1939, he left for the US to become head of the aeronautical engineering department at Lewis University in Illinois. When World War II broke out, he was allowed to stay in the US and did not return to Italy until 1943, when Italy had surrendered to Allied forces.

Finally, in 1945, his name was cleared of all charges related to the crash of the “Italia” by the Italian Air Force and he received the rank of major general.  His political ambitions were crushed when he, having worked in the Soviet Union for five years, was accused of being a communist.  He decided to go back to teaching, again at the University of Naples, which he did until he retired.

He wrote several more books on the voyage and crash of the “Italia” and one of them “the red tent” was made into a movie.

Although his polar exploration was a brief one, he contributed greatly in the knowledge of Arctic geography and he proved that it was possible to use aircraft in the Arctic for both exploration and transport.