He formed a partnership with three other engineers in July 1918. The others were Giuseppe Valle, Benedetto Croce, and Celestino Usuelli. The partners believed that semi-rigid airships were superior to either the small non-rigids or the large rigids. The core belief may have been that the semi-rigid could combine the relatively low capital cost of the non-rigid with much of the range and endurance of the rigid. In the early 1920s airships seemed to have important advantages over aeroplanes; greater range, endurance, and safety. Few aviation people expected the aeroplane to develop rapidly and become superior to the airship in all but a few specialist roles. The company built a large semi-rigid called the T-34. It was 125 m long; 25 m in diameter, and the envelope contained 33,810 m3 of hydrogen. It was sold to the American Army who fitted it with six 400 hp liberty engines and renamed it the Roma. On February 21, 1922, the ship was flying over Norfolk, Virginia under the command of Captain Dale Mabry and experienced control problems with its complex tail fins and rudders. It hit high tension wires and crashed in flames, killing 34 and injuring eight. Only three of the crew escaped unharmed, and Captain Mabry was among the dead. The accident was not necessarily caused by a design fault. One commentator has noted that experience in ship handling was measured in years, but flight experience was measured in hours. In the 1920s every pilot was inexperienced by modern standards. One of the reasons that aviation has got steadily safer is that all concerned in the operation of aircraft have got more experienced over time and have benefited from the lessons learned from the mistakes of their predecessors.
Nobile went to the United States in 1922 and worked for Goodyear in Akron, Ohio. After returning to Italy the N1 was built to his design and first flew in March 1924. Nobile had one or two eccentricities including his practice of taking his dog Titina with him when flying, including his Arctic flights with the Norge and Italia. Another notable trait was his driving. Amundsen devoted more than a page of his autobiography to describing how terrifying was his practice of accelerating into corners and jamming on the brakes at the last moment. Riiser-Larsen and Amundsen were notably courageous men, but Nobile’s driving had them both trying to persuade him to slow down and be more careful. Writing after falling out with Nobile, Amundsen said that he saw the driving as evidence of an erratic nature and extreme nervousness. Riiser-Larsen persuaded Amundsen that these characteristics on terra-firma did not mean that Nobile would behave that way when flying the airship. Nobile would be 41 years of age in the year of the great flight. In 1927, Amundsen wrote:
“Nobile on several occasions during the actual flight across the Arctic revealed exactly the same qualities he had exhibited at the wheel of the motor car, and more than once put us in peril of disaster.”
Whatever Nobile may have done in Amundsen’s presence, the record shows that he successfully piloted Norge from Italy to Alaska in stages, a flight that took 170 hours flying, spread over several weeks. This was one of the most notable achievements with an airship in this era.
Nobile responded to the invitation, and when he met with Amundsen and Riiser-Larsen he not only answered all the technical questions, but was empowered by the Italian government to negotiate the terms of the contract that would make the N1 available for the flight. He told them that the expedition could have the airship free of charge if it flew the Italian flag during the flight. This was the first hint of the controversy which would cause a public rift between Amundsen, Nobile, and their respective nations after the successful flight. There is a saying that failure is an orphan, but success has a thousand fathers, and there was to be a classic illustration of this saying in the unseemly grab for the credit. Amundsen answered in the negative; the airship would be registered in Norway, fly the Norwegian flag, be under the control of the Norwegian Aero Club, and be named the Norge. Amundsen would be the expedition leader, Ellsworth the co-leader, and Riiser-Larsen the co-pilot and navigator. The expedition was to be named the Amundsen-Ellsworth Polar Flight. There were political and social reasons for this insistence that primary credit be given be given to Norway. The first half of the twentieth century saw nationalism reach its peak in often bloody ways. Amundsen would not live to experience World War II (1939–1945), but he had experienced the First (1914–1918) in which developed nations seemed to lose all sense of proportion and moderation. Expeditions like the one being planned were a way of bolstering a nation’s sense of identity and pride without resorting to armed force. Norway had only been independent since 1905, took great pride in the achievements of men like Amundsen and Nansen, was going to provide much of the money and support for the flight, and did not intend to share the credit any more than they absolutely had to. They could not do it without Ellsworth’s money, but he was only one man, was popular in Norway and acknowledging him was not a problem.
Amundsen mixed with Kings and Queens, Presidents, and Prime Ministers. Here he is with Italian Prime-Minister Benito Mussolini at Ciampino in 1926. Mussolini was a pilot and aviation enthusiast, and was also Air Minister.
Italy was also a new nation which had only come into existence in the 1860s with the unification of the many nation states on the Italian peninsula and Sicily; any achievement that reflected well on the country as a whole tended to bring the sections closer together. There was also a specific political force at work. The fascists, led by Benito Mussolini, had come to power in 1922 and the success of an Italian flight and the international acclaim it generated would help him consolidate the power of the fascist party. There were also social forces at work. Aviation was new, modern, and highly technical. Prominent aviators were national and international heroes, and there was widespread public interest in successful flights. The 1920s and 30s were the age in which aviation developed rapidly and societies became air-minded. Countries like Italy, Germany, and the USSR put great emphasis on bringing aviation to the people. Flying, gliding, and parachuting had a military value, and a nation’s achievements were a source of great national pride. Successful aviators helped their societies to become technologically advanced. In Germany, Italy, and the USSR, aviators were seen as role models. The aviator was could be seen as the fascist or socialist or communist superman (or, to a limited extent, superwoman). So negotiations on who got the credit were fraught with powerful feelings of national pride. Benito Mussolini (himself a pilot), the Italian fascist dictator, wrote this in November 1923:
“Not everyone can fly . . . Flying must remain the privilege of an aristocracy; but everyone must want to fly, everyone must regard flying with longing. All good citizens, all devoted citizens must follow with profound feeling the development of Italian wings.”
Amundsen came to understand the forces at work and made this comment about the negotiations in his autobiography published the year after the great flight:
“I did not understand the significance at the time, but it is now clear that it was a deliberate effort on the part of the government to gain for the present political regime [the Italian fascists] in particular, and for the Italian people in general, a world-wide advertisement. My idea of a trans-polar flight was thus subtly to be appropriated as their own by the Italians, and my skill in Arctic exploration was to be utilised as the means of a dramatic achievement for which the Italians would take the credit.”
Another factor mentioned in the autobiography was that Riiser-Larsen, Dietrichson, and Omdal were to contribute to the flight and share the honors. One of the most positive features of Amundsen’s character was his ability to choose the right men for the job, and his loyalty in seeing they shared in the credit for a successful expedition. Without Amundsen’s prestige and leadership skills, Ellsworth’s money, Nobile’s airship design and piloting skills, and Norway’s national Aero Club, there would have been no flight. More than 85 years after the event it seems clear that the credit should have been equally divided, but in 1925–26 it was impossible for the parties to be as dispassionate and objective.
Nobile agreed to sign on as captain of the airship and to supervise the modification from
a short-range passenger carrier suitable for flights in the relative warmth and settled weather of the Mediterranean to a long-range vehicle suitable for long flights including the one from Spitsbergen to the North Pole and on to Alaska. The price for the ship was agreed to be $75,000, $25,000 less than the $100,000 that Ellsworth had agreed to provide. Agreement on purchase was quickly reached, and the discussion turned to technical matters.
The N1 had a soft nose as it did not have to use a mooring mast in its Italian flights. When not in use, it was housed in a hangar and a large force of men was needed to walk it in and out of its hangar. It had to be modified to use the masts to be built for it at Oslo, Vadsø, and Kings Bay. Nobile agreed to design and have fitted a reinforced nose-cone which could lock in to a cone on the top of the masts. Airship masts were unknown in Italy, and Nobile visited Great Britain to study the masts developed by the airship pioneer Major Scott. He then produced the design from which the three masts were constructed.
Another big modification was to reduce the size of the control car mounted under the forward part of the ship. The old car had housed passengers as well as the captain, helmsmen, navigator, and radio-operator. The new car would be much shorter and lighter, as it would only need to house the operating crew, Amundsen, and Ellsworth as observers. Wherever possible the structure was to be lightened to produce the lightest possible airship, and therefore the greatest possible usable lift. The aim was to produce a ship that could carry about 16 crew and passengers, fuel and oil for about 75 hours flight at around 43 kt., plus survival gear carefully chosen by Amundsen, always the total professional in these matters.
Nobile and Riiser-Larsen flying Nobile’s 1000 m3 semi-rigid airship Mr. Said to be the smallest semi-rigid ever flown, Nobile used it for experimental and recreational flying and often made water landings in it.
Nobile and Riiser-Larsen in the cockpit of Mr which was powered by a small radial engine driving a two bladed wooden propeller.
Amundsen was not just an explorer. Even when not in the Arctic or Antarctic he spent a lot of his time away from Norway. He gave lectures on his expeditions in many countries. As a man who spent his life either preparing for his next expedition, on the expedition, or raising money to pay off the debts of the last expedition, he was a great traveler. This was long before cheap air travel made the world accessible. He spoke a number of languages, and was worldly in every sense of the word. In 1924, he had visited Italy and had taken a flight in N1 which was based at Ciampino. Riiser-Larsen had flown with Nobile in a small airship called the Mr. This was said to be the smallest semi-rigid airship built down to that time. It was powered by a single radial engine driving a two-bladed, wooden-pusher propeller. It had a boat-shaped, water-tight car with a pneumatic shock absorber. It could land on water and Nobile did this from time to time. A flight in 1928 demonstrated how maneuverable the little airship was by landing in downtown Rome.
Riiser-Larsen went with Amundsen for part of his lecture tour of Europe. When Amundsen went to the United States, Riiser-Larsen and Dietrichson continued the lecture series, each covering a different list of cities. Interest varied from place to place, and in one city Riiser-Larsen gave his talk to an audience of 60 in a hall with seating for 3,000. In Berlin the impresario paid him 1,000 Reichsmarks not to give the talk as he would have lost more if the lecture had taken place. His final lecture was at Stettin where the hall was sold out and in the final accounting the 1925 flight made a profit. Riiser-Larsen was entitled to a payment of 30,000 kroner, but he chose to donate this amount to the 1926 expedition.
The commitments that Amundsen and Ellsworth had in the United States prevented them from taking part in the complex task of attending to the details that had to be sorted out in the months leading up to the flight. Amundsen then brought the Norwegian Aero Club into the venture, and the Club agreed to do what was necessary to turn the preliminary arrangements into concrete agreements. The President of the Club was Dr. Rolf Thommessen, who was also the owner and editor of Tidens Tegn, a paper published in Oslo that had one of the largest circulations of any daily in Norway. While the organisation was called (in the English language sources) the Norwegian Aero Club, it was not an aero club in the modern sense of an organization, which trained pilots and made aircraft available to them. Its purpose was to promote aviation in Norway and get the population interested. These were the early days of manned flight and long before aircraft were everywhere and affordable air transport was taken for granted. The leaders of all developed nations realised that aviation had, potentially, great things to offer and that populations had to be encouraged or persuaded to accept aviation as part of their lives. The Aero Club took on the job of negotiating with the Italians in general and Nobile in particular. Negotiations about the conditions under which the Norge would make her flight, and who would be aboard, continued for several months. An objective observer can see that the Italians had a strong hand when they negotiated. They had the airship, the pilot, and crew, and Amundsen and Ellsworth needed them more than they needed Amundsen and Ellsworth.
Nobile had asked that five Italian airshipmen be aboard the Norge during the flight as they were experienced in operating an airship. This was agreed to as there was a dearth of Norwegians experienced in the operation of an airship. Early in January 1926, Nobile travelled to Oslo to sign his contract. Amundsen wrote that Nobile signed a contract that confirmed that his fee for piloting the airship would be 40,000 kroner, and the very next day asked for 15,000 kroner more. The reason he gave was that he had to give up a lucrative contract with the Japanese in order to make the Polar flight. If it happened exactly as stated, Nobile was being a bit slippery as, of course, he must have known about this when negotiating the lower figure. The Aero Club agreed, and so Nobile’s remuneration was increased to 55,000 kroner. Amundsen criticised them for it, but a contract is only as enforceable as both parties want it to be. If Nobile had then backed out a law suit would have been a spectacular irrelevancy. Nobile then asked that he be allowed to contribute to the expedition book. It was normal practice for a book to be written and published as soon after an expedition as possible, to meet a portion of the expenses. If Nobile contributed, and was named on the title page, there would be a reasonable inference that his part in the expedition had been especially valuable. At this stage Amundsen and Ellsworth were attempting to have a say in commercially important matters by telegram, and there was a limit to what influence they could have at a distance. Dr. Thommesen agreed that Nobile could contribute, and the final agreement allowed Nobile to contribute a section on the technical and aeronautical aspects of the flight. This went further than Amundsen was prepared to go, but since his agent, the Aero Club, had agreed there was nothing he could do about it.
The preparation of an airship base at Kings Bay was started. Joh Höver was assigned the task of locating suitable sites for the hangar and mast and surveying them. The Sörland was the last boat of the year and sailed for Ny-Ålesund on October 4, 1925. Höver, cement, steel poles and steel bolts for the mast were aboard. The bolts were specially forged and were two meters long and 23.5 cm in circumference. Bad weather slowed the passage and it took 13 days instead of the normal six, and the ship arrived on October 17, after navigating through calf ice (from the glaciers) which littered the bay. The day before arrival the passengers and crew had the privilege of seeing the aurora borealis and stars reflected in the (now calm) sea. The settlement at Ny-Ålesund was built by the coal company which operated mines at the site. Höver consulted with Engineer Sherdal who had been at Ny-Ålesund for six years, particularly about the prevailing winds. After several days of exploration, sites for the mast and hangar were found and surveyed in with an assistant, theodolite, and measuring tape. The hangar was to lie southeast by northwest and was 110 m x 34 m and was 30 m high.
The hangar at Kings Bay was constructed during the winter of 1925-1926. The workers had to work in the cold and snow and under lights because it was dark 24 hours a day for most of the ti
me they were there, although the moon was above the horizon 24 hours a day. The hangar frame is almost completed. The walls were clad with green sailcloth panels and had no roof. The doors were massive sheets of canvas winched up into place.
Master Builder Arild and Forman Andresen were to supervise the construction. On October 23, the Alekto arrived with Arild, some of the men, 600 m3 of timber, 50 tons of iron, and food and equipment for 32 men for three months. There was a narrow gauge railway (operated by horses) and a spur was laid to the hangar site. The mining company had a power plant which provided electricity and enabled the work to go on under lights through the 24-hour a day darkness of the winter months. Two hundred meters3 of concrete had to be prepared and poured for the anchoring blocks of the hangar and mooring mast. The sun went down for the winter on October 26, 1925, although the moon was above the horizon permanently and provided some light to assist the builders.
Höver departed on the last boat of the season on October 30, and left the builders to their work. The winter snow made finding the materials at the site difficult but the work continued on schedule. The mooring mast was triangular with a six meter base and a 40-ton block of concrete at each corner. The concrete mix had to be heated in the winter cold but sand and stone were available locally and there was 30,000 tons of coal on site so obtaining hot water was not a problem. By February 1926, the hangar had risen to seven meters. On February 15, the framework of the walls was in place and the flag of Norway was raised over the building in celebration. Snow, sub-zero temperatures, wind, and darkness had not stopped the work. The hangar was a skeleton with no roof or doors. In fact it was designed to be a windbreak as protection from the wind was its main purpose. Early in 1926 the Hobby arrived from Trondheim with a cargo including 10,000 m2 of French sailcloth to cover the trestles of the hangar. Sail-maker Houdan supervised the covering of the trestles which made up the hangar walls. The sailcloth consisted of 22 patches of sailcloth each 30 m x 32 m x 5 m and each furnished with bolt ropes, eyes and hanks. The patches were laced onto the wall trestles. The doors of the hangar were made up of sailcloth sheets that had to cover an opening of about 30 m x 24 m and were pyramidal in shape, with part draped onto the ground. This shape reduced the strain on the walls in a gale. The doors were raised with a winch at each side. Looking back many years later Riiser-Larsen had this to say about the building of the hangar through an arctic winter:
From Pole to Pole Page 11
