COMMUNISTS TO RESCUE FASCISTS, 1928: 2/4: N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, by Mark Piesing @PorterSqBooks.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/N-4-Down-Arctic-Airship-Italia/dp/0062851527
Triumphantly returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928, the world-famous exploring airship Italia—code-named N-4—was struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history. Helping lead the search was the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the poles’ greatest explorer, who himself soon went missing in the frozen wastes. Amundsen’s body has never been found, the last victim of one of the Arctic’s most enduring mysteries . . .
During the Roaring Twenties, zeppelin travel embodied the exuberant spirit of the age. Germany’s luxurious Graf Zeppelin would run passenger service from Germany to Brazil; Britain’s Imperial Airship was launched to connect an empire; in America, the iconic spire of the rising Empire State Building was designed as a docking tower for airships.
1895 PARIS
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Mark Pising, the author of the new book |
| 0:09.7 | En4 Down, The Hunt for the the failure and this is a success sort of it is 1926 and in a place called Kings Bay |
| 0:28.7 | they've constructed a hangar and by hand and it's weathered the winter and in March of |
| 0:34.8 | 1926 approaching Norway approaching the northern tip of Norway for the |
| 0:41.0 | launch to the North Pole is N1 which has been especially |
| 0:45.1 | rebuilt from a luxury craft for cruising the Mediterranean, a lighter than |
| 0:49.3 | aircraft, to an Arctic Explorer and nobl's done it. Mark what do we what do we know about |
| 0:55.8 | Nobilay's change of N1 into the Norga? What's he done to it? |
| 1:00.1 | Well one of the key things is, well basically the key thing is make it lighter so you can carry |
| 1:08.7 | more fuel. So that means getting rid of the gondola as it was as a kind of luxury thing for the |
| 1:14.7 | king and his entourage to kind of fly around the Italian and Mediterranean |
| 1:18.6 | processions. So that was stripped out, made a lot lighter. |
| 1:24.1 | I mean, although the phone was kept in |
| 1:29.1 | perhaps, I imagine nobody has some idea coming back to Italy and the King riding in his airship again. |
| 1:35.6 | And it was things like the valve inlets to the envelope trying to protect things from the ice you know because you know everyone |
| 1:45.5 | warned him and like if you're going to take an airship up into the North Pole, one of the biggest |
| 1:48.7 | dangers is ice forming on top of the great envelope because this airship was about the size of A380. |
| 1:55.7 | You know, so it's a huge craft and all that could be covered in ice. |
| 2:00.8 | So it's, you know, how do we protect that from ice? I mean is that |
| 2:05.6 | kind of thing basically making it lighter so you can carry more fuel, go |
| 2:10.5 | further and can protect against the ice. |
| 2:14.0 | They let's take them let's take them off because there are a lot of details here and there's lots of tension. |
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