Umberto Nobile

Umberto Nobile was an Italian aeronautical engineer who spent the interwar years developing semi-rigid airships when most of aviation had moved on. In 1926 he piloted the Norge across the polar ice cap from Europe to America, possibly the first aircraft to reach the North Pole and certainly the first to complete the transpolar crossing. Two years later he returned in the Italia, another airship of his own design. That expedition ended in a crash on the ice. The wreck triggered an international rescue effort that itself claimed lives, with some rescuers disappearing and presumed dead. Nobile survived and lived another five decades, dying in 1978 at ninety-three.