COMMUNISTS TO RESCUE FASCISTS, 1928: 3/4: 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
⏱️ 13 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.
1907 FORREST PARK
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| 0:29.2 | Code at UK. This is |
| 0:35.0 | on CBS I on the world. |
| 0:38.0 | I'm John Baps for with Mark Peizing. |
| 0:40.0 | His new book is N4 Down, The hunt for the Arctic airship Italia. It is now |
| 0:45.4 | 1928. Our hero, our protagonist from Italy, Umberto Nobile, has put together another expedition to the North Pole, this one to top everything, to land |
| 0:57.9 | at the North Pole, perhaps to circumnavigate the Arctic. |
| 1:01.5 | He's got a new airship this time, which he's dubbed the Italia. It's no longer sharing with Norway. |
| 1:07.0 | Mark, what is important about the design of the Italian for the Arctic? |
| 1:13.0 | Well, I suppose it's almost exactly the same as the N1, I guess, and I suppose that everyone is a proven design, |
| 1:21.0 | and the N4 is almost exactly the same I suppose it's a bit |
| 1:26.3 | more design for the Arctic outright so it's so again it is on lightweight, making sure everything's still protected, trying to learn the |
| 1:37.4 | lessons from the earlier flight. |
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