“We are heavy," the crewman shouted as the giant airship dropped through the fog toward the sea ice below. It was as if Thor himself were hurling the Italia out of the sky.
Perhaps the great explorer Roald Amundsen was right, thought General Umberto Nobile, leader of the expedition. The Italians were a “half-tropical breed” who did not belong in the Arctic.
Prodigy, dirigible engineer, aeronaut, Arctic explorer, opponent of Mussolini, maybe even a Soviet spy, and always accompanied by his Fox Terrier, Titina, Nobile twice flew jumbo-jet-size airships—lighter-than-air craft that he himself had designed and built—on the epic journey from Rome to Svalbard to explore the Arctic. The first was the Norge, which Nobile and his crew had successfully flown from Norway to Alaska in 1926 to become the first to overfly the North Pole.
