Airship Italia - Causes of The Crash

Causes of The Crash

The causes of the crash remain controversial even today. The severe Arctic climate and decision to head back to base in the teeth of a worsening gale, rather than continue across the Pole to attempt a landing in Canada, was the main cause. It is significant that this fact alone almost drove meteorologist Finn Malmgren to attempt suicide twice soon after the crash.

Another factor is the decision to let the airship rise above the cloud layer, causing heating and then expansion of the hydrogen, which triggered automatic valving of the gas. Once the engines were restarted, the ship dived through the cloud into freezing air again and, either because the automatic valves were jammed open, or because the ship had already lost too much gas above the clouds, it could no longer stay aloft. Although Umberto Nobile was the victim of a smear campaign after the crash, one criticism of him, from the master airship pilot Hugo Eckener is perhaps justified — that Nobile should never have climbed above the cloud layer in the first place.

Another possibility is a rupture of one of the gas cells, although it is difficult to understand why this would not have been immediately noticed by any of the crew on duty. The most recent theory suggests that the outer shell of the airship was damaged during the pre-flight ice removal, when a group of men wearing ice cleats hacked at the airship with pickaxes.

In his book Dr. Eng. Felice Trojani, one of the airship engineers reported that in the years after crash, he examined 11 different possible causes in detail without coming to any real solution.