Umberto Nobile: LSE

 

"We are quite aware that our venture is difficult and dangerous – even more so than that of 1926 – but it is this very difficulty and danger which attracts us. Had it been safe and easy other people would have already preceded us".

"In his forty years he looked wonderful — almost a classical beauty with pure, noble features, inspired brown eyes and a high, clear forehead. I soon found that his subordinates would gladly follow him to the ends of the earth. Nobody ever grumbled about unpaid overtime, not an angry word, not a dissatisfied remark." So wrote Lise Lindbeck, Nobile's collaborator during the controversial Italia expedition. The testimony is worth holding onto, because it captures that Umberto Nobile (1885-1978), an Italian aviator, aeronautical engineer and Arctic explorer, was, first and foremost, a man his people trusted and wanted to work for.

He is best known for designing and piloting the Norge (1926), the first aircraft to reach the North Pole, and commanding the Italia (1928) expedition, which ended in a fatal, controversial crash. After being criticized for being rescued first during the Italia disaster, Nobile left Italy, working in the Soviet Union (1932–1936) and in the US (1939-1942).

The LSE profile may not be that glamorous — no ILE's sparkling theoretical originality, no EIE's theatrical passion, no SLE's conquering aggression, — but what it offers instead is something rarer and more dependable: competence as a form of care. The LSE builds, organizes, improves, and protects. He is proud of doing things right, and his pride extends naturally to the people and projects under his charge. 

Nobile fits this profile quite well. His career was a single long demonstration of applied engineering intelligence directed toward a concrete goal: proving that the semi-rigid airship was the superior technology for long-range polar flight, and proving it by actually flying the thing. He didn't theorize about airship design from a university chair — he got a pilot's license, supervised assembly personally in Japan, and flew test routes himself. The LSE trait of noticing immediately where efficiency can be improved was in his case a hands-on engineering obsession that he pursued across decades, countries, and political systems. According to Talanov, Nobile's greatest strength as a designer was not so much his technical innovations as his keen organizational talent, including his well-known fervent devotion to production schedules.

The evacuation plan he drew up after the Italia crash is a small but revealing document. When the first Swedish rescue plane landed with room for one passenger, Nobile had already prepared a ranked list: the mechanic Cecioni first (two broken legs), himself fourth. That the rescue pilot Lundborg refused this plan and took Nobile first, and that this decision would haunt Nobile for the rest of his life, tells us about the type's responsibility: he spent fifty years trying to establish that he had done the right thing, because for LSE, having done the right thing is not separable from being able to demonstrate that you did. After Nobile was flown out, Lundborg returned for others but crashed his plane himself, becoming trapped with the crew until the Soviet icebreaker Krassin rescued the remaining survivors 48 days after the crash.

The subsequent inquiry, orchestrated by his fascist enemies and designed to place the disaster's blame on his shoulders, wounded him in exactly the way it would wound this type most deeply. The LSE's self-esteem is bound up in competence and in the verdict of the practical world: did the thing work, was it done correctly, was the responsibility properly discharged? To have all three of those questions answered publicly in the negative was an injury Nobile could not dismiss. He offended Mussolini by detailing his grievances at length (being less than diplomatic in questions regarding efficiency is a typical LSE trait), resigned from the air force in protest, moved to the Soviet Union to build the airship program there, 1936, then, after briefly returning to Italy, went to America in 1939. The LSE, despite the relatively cheerful "emotivist" nature, does not let go of the question of whether he did his job well, because it is not a question he is capable of treating as merely rhetorical.

Nobile was rehabilitated after the war, having established a reputation as a leading figure in early 20th-century aviation, with his career spanning pioneering engineering work and dramatic polar exploration. He died at ninety-three, shortly after the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of his expeditions.