Mark Piesing's Blog, page 11

The Anchorage Daily News review: ‘N-4 Down,’ an engrossing narrative of Arctic air exploration and a polar rescue attempt

Read critic David James great review of my new book N-4 DOWN: the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia in full below, or by following this link.

Want to know more?

Read The Wall Street Journal review

Read The Forbes review

Read the New York Journal of Books review

See my talk about N-4 DOWN for New York’s famous The Explorer’s Club here.

Listen to my interview with CBS radio here.

A century ago, airships plied the skies. While we often remember the Wright brothers for ushering in the age of aviation, we tend to overlook the fact that before passenger airplanes arrived, dirigibles were put to use carrying people and freight over long distances, mapping unknown regions along the way. During the 1920s, there was fierce competition between proponents of airplanes and airships over the future of flying. And for a few years, it seemed dirigibles, which cornered trans-Atlantic flightpaths, had the upper hand, until the fiery crash of the Hindenburg, the one zeppelin we’ve all heard about.

A century ago, the Arctic remained largely unexplored. Frederick Cook and Robert Peary had both claimed to have reached the North Pole, although both probably lied. Still, at least they had been nearby. Crossing the sea ice was, for most people, impossible on foot. But perhaps not by air. Roald Amundsen, the famed Norwegian polar explorer who had been first to navigate the Northwest Passage and first to reach the South Pole, and who understood better than most what technologies worked in such extreme conditions, wanted to be the first man to see both poles. And he came to realize that air was the best means of transportation in the Arctic.

A century ago, both Amundsen and Italian aviator Umberto Nobile wanted to fly to the North Pole. They joined forces in partnership aboard an airship built by Nobile called the Norge, and in 1926 flew from Spitsbergen to Alaska, making the first documented crossing over the North Pole along the way. They proved the utility of airships for travel over the crest of the globe, but by the time they landed, their partnership had collapsed beyond the point of speaking to each other.

Yet their fates were intimately tied. Two years later, Nobile returned to the Arctic with another dirigible, the Italia, and reached the North Pole again. Then the ship crashed onto the ice. Some of the men escaped. Others were carried away in the cabin when the gas balloon on the airship hoisted it back into the air, never to be seen again. A weeks-long international search was undertaken for the survivors. Amundsen joined and himself vanished without a trace. Once rescued, Nobile returned in disgrace to an Italy ruled by Benito Mussolini.

This is the story that British journalist Mark Piesing undertakes in “N-4 Down,” and he proves himself up to the task and more. The story he’s chosen has all the elements of good fiction. Difficult and complex leading characters, epic conflicts of man vs. man and man vs. nature, political intrigue, high adventure, destructive hubris and significant tragedy. Plus it has airships over the Arctic, which would send it into the realm of steampunk had it not actually happened.

Piesing has taken on a complicated and richly detailed narrative and crafted a work of literary nonfiction that readers will get lost in, but in a good way. Working with seemingly no end of plot twists, and more characters than most writers would know what to do with, he’s written a suspense tale that proves impossible to put down.

Piesing takes his readers into the heady world of of the 1920s. In the aftermath of what was then called the Great War, trade and travel were again on the upswing. To those in the emerging field of aviation, the Age of Exploration was over, global connections were being established, the future belonged to pilots, and Nobile was among the most skilled. For him, Amundsen was a relic of a bygone era, but important for validating their shared goal of reaching the planet’s pinnacle.

Amundsen, for his part, was both forward-thinking and past his prime, and also perennially broke despite his achievements. Reaching the North Pole by airship would give him one last moment of glory before retirement.

Nobile’s talents as an airship pilot were in part due to his brash self-confidence. He was gregarious and social. He was also caught in the fascist movement that had seized control of his country. He was a party member by invitation, but not inclination, and by all indications, was privately a communist. He was a man of what he believed to be the future.

Amundsen was famously aloof, unwilling to show any emotion other than anger, and growing increasingly paranoid with age. Mentally, he lived in a different place than 1920s Europe, and the era’s politics seem to have held little interest to him. He was the last great European explorer, and likely knew so. Twenty years after finding global fame with his twin polar victories, he was adrift. He was becoming a man of the past.

Nobile’s two polar treks aboard airships would define the relationship between the two and reveal their full characters, something Piesing explores well. But it would take mishaps and tragedies to get there. After the Italia went down, the survivors on the ice split, with one group remaining in place and another attempting to walk out. What ensued was one of those classic tales of Arctic survival involving misery, hunger, accidents, deaths and rumors of cannibalism. Piesing vividly places us in camp with Nobile and his crewmen, who spent weeks with dwindling supplies, wondering if rescue would arrive before food ran out.

Despite his falling out with Nobile, Amundsen leapt into the rescue effort, but he didn’t get far. His plane vanished after departing Tromsø, and he and his partners were never found. They were among the many who died rescuing Nobile from his dream turned nightmare.

Piesing’s writing can be likened to that of Simon Winchester, another British journalist with a penchant for narrative histories. The book moves quickly through the story, yet manages to incorporate extensive details and place the story fully in the era in which it occurred.

A century ago, men came north equipped with aircraft and radio, thinking the Arctic would finally be easy. It wasn’t. “N-4 Down” is the unforgettable story of why.

David James

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based critic and freelance writer. He can be reached at nobugsinak@gmail.com.

My latest for BBC Future: The aircraft that will never fly on Earth

If you could fly a drone in the skies of Mars, you could cover a lot more territory far more quickly than with a rover. But designing one is an enormous challenge.

Check out my latest piece for BBC Future by clicking here.

I will post the full-text next week.

It was very well received!

Averting climate disaster: is there a role for solar engineering?

Forecasts indicate that we’re heading for disastrous levels of global warming. It might be time to accept that controversial solar engineering methods to tackle the problem are a necessary evil.

Read my recent feature for Raconteur in full below, or the original here.

It made the front page of one Raconteur’s renowned Special Reports which are published inside in The Times newspaper.

Read The Path To A Greener Future report here.

Most people recognise that we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to decelerate global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends that the world’s temperature increase be kept to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels, yet we’re currently on course for a much warmer future.

A projection published in July by Our World in Data indicates that the planet is likely to heat up by between 2.7ºC and 3.1ºC by the end of the century if existing climate policies remain in place. If countries honour their latest pledges on cutting emissions, the figure could be reduced to 2.4ºC, scientists predict, but this is clearly still far higher than the IPCC’s recommendation.

This is where geoengineering comes in. Many people see this large-scale manipulation of the Earth’s climate systems as the only effective solution to the global warming problem, yet it comes with huge problems of its own.

Tim Kruger is manager of the University of Oxford’s geoengineering programme. He notes that Eli Kintisch, author of the 2010 book Hack the Planet: science’s best hope – or worst nightmare – for averting climate catastrophe “called geoengineering a bad idea whose time has come. It’s not something that people would want to reach for immediately. It has all sorts of potential side effects, but it is something we need to consider. If we don’t, we’re not taking climate change seriously.”

One of the main categories of geoengineering is solar engineering, also known as solar radiation modification (SRM). This involves reflecting sunlight away from the Earth, usually by spraying chemicals into the atmosphere in aerosol form.

There has been little field research into SRM so far. In 2009, Russian scientists conducted what’s thought to be the first experiment when they mounted aerosol generators on a helicopter and sprayed particles 200m into the air. They claim that this reduced the amount of sunlight reaching ground level. There was another test in 2011, but several have since failed to make it off the launchpad. 

For instance, the UK’s stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering (Spice) project aimed to pump particles up a pipe to a high-altitude balloon that would then scatter these into the atmosphere. But it was scrapped in 2012 after a public backlash. 

In March 2021, researchers from Harvard University were forced to postpone an experiment in northern Sweden that would have launched a balloon into the stratosphere to test the so-called Pinatubo option, named after a volcano in the Philippines whose 1991 eruption reduced global temperatures by 0.5°C within 15 months. If ever deployed at scale, this method would involve putting thousands of tonnes of sulphates into the stratosphere.

Geoengineering solutions are tools in our toolbox. As every week passes, we get closer to the inevitability of having to use them

The Harvard scientists’ plans were more modest: when their balloon reached an altitude of 20km, it would spray out less than 2kg of chalk dust and the researchers would monitor the particles’ interactions with the atmosphere. But they didn’t get the chance. The flight, which had faced vehement opposition from environmentalists, was cancelled because the academics had failed to seek consent from the region’s indigenous Sámi people.

George Monbiot, one of the UK’s most prominent climate campaigners, classifies geoengineering proposals into two groups: those (such as carbon-capture technologies) that he believes are “safe, expensive and totally useless; and those that are cheap, effective and extremely dangerous. At this end is pouring sulphur compounds into the atmosphere. It makes a lot more sense to be growing trees.”

Such opposition has left most policy-makers reluctant to publicly voice their support for any kind of SRM activity, which encompasses methods other than the Pinatubo option. These include cloud thinning, which modifies high-altitude clouds to allow more heat to escape, and brightening, which adds a fine salt mist to low clouds over the sea to make them more reflective. And, back down at sea level, it has even been proposed that a thin layer of reflective glass powder could be poured over Arctic ice to protect it from the sun’s rays.

Yet solar engineering will be necessary, according to Hugh Hunt, professor of engineering dynamics and vibration at the University of Cambridge and a co-investigator on the ill-fated Spice project. 

“Geoengineering solutions – whether they’re capturing carbon dioxide or reflecting sunlight – are tools in our toolbox. As every week passes, we get closer to the inevitability of having to use them,” he argues.

Research into solar engineering is ongoing. In March, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) surprised many observers by recommending that the White House spend up to $200m (£145m) on a new SRM programme. While there are no signs yet of such an investment, this development has heightened activists’ fears that the technology’s use will be normalised – and that its early adoption by one country could even stoke up geopolitical tensions. 

“The risk is that the research they’re doing and the experiments they want to run, especially under the vastly expanded programme proposed by the NASEM, will inevitably develop the technology for deployment,” says Raymond Pierrehumbert, professor of physics at the University of Oxford. “As we did with the hydrogen bomb, we know that the technology is feasible, but many of our questions about it can be answered only through deploying it on a near-full scale. That is why the research is dangerous.”

There are also legitimate concerns about the motives of some of the groups seeking to push geoengineering up the agenda. “It’s certainly true that there are people on the right of the political spectrum who believe that SRM is the way to avoid having to decarbonise the economy,” Kruger notes. 

Indeed, Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives and confidant of Donald Trump, proclaimed in 2008: “We would have an option to address global warming by rewarding scientific innovation. Bring on American ingenuity. Stop the green pig.”

Ultimately, even though geoengineering poses several risks, business leaders need to ensure that there’s further research in this field. But such investments need to act in conjunction with rapid emission reductions. Otherwise, there might not be much of an economy left to save.

The Free Lance-Star review: ‘N-4 Down” shows how polar explorers were blinded by ice, snow and vanity

Read the latest review of my new book N-4 DOWN in The Free Lance-Star, which is the the principal daily newspaper distributed throughout Fredericksburg, Virginia, United States, in full below, or by clicking on this link. Readers in Europe will have to use a VPN.

Want to know more?

Read The Wall Street Journal review

Read The Forbes review

Read the New York Journal of Books review

See my talk about N-4 DOWN for New York’s famous The Explorer’s Club here.

Listen to my interview with CBS radio here.

Pity the airship. The dirigible came of age while fixed-wing, combustion engine-powered aircraft were still in their infancy. Airships ferried passengers vast stretches, all while setting speed and distance records. They also were a valuable vessel for exploring once-unreachable lands at the start of the 20th century.

Yet our collective memory of them seems limited to their ghastly demise. Cue the Hindenburg-ablaze film stock. Flip through the black-and-white prints of the wrecked R–101 or the Roma (crashed in Norfolk).

Now, Mark Piesing has penned “N–4 Down,” a recounting of another airship meeting its demise. This tale, however, is less a requiem for the airship era than an examination of how hubris curtails the potential of the machines humans make.

Piesing alludes to an odd parallel between the airships and the explorers of that time. Like the hydrogen-filled dirigibles, the men pining to be “the first” have inflated senses of destiny and combustible egos. The fates of both machine and men were at the mercy of the elements: for airships, it was unpredictable weather; for explorers, it was politics, pride and jealous rivals.

The book centers on Italian general Umberto Nobile, an airship crusader, developer and pilot. All told, his life’s work is one to be celebrated. He shepherds the creation of a line of prized Italian airships. He pilots one of them, the Norge, in the first successful flight through the North Pole and over the entire Arctic ice sheet.

But he’s dogged by a rival Italian air force officer, a German airship builder and famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen—all seeking the status and influence Nobile has amassed. In a bid to maintain his fortunes, Nobile attempts a more-daring 1928 Arctic mission with his new airship, the N–4, that ends catastrophically. The search for the N–4, named Italia, produces more anguish for the would-be rescuers (Amundsen would be among the casualties), and later, for Nobile.

One of the joys of reading accounts of events a century ago is that authors gain access to letters, diaries, journals and other handwritten material that provide so much texture to narratives. Consequently, the stories are rich in detail. Piesing provides great context about the aviation era. He also reveals how petty and shallow explorers, top celebrities of the day, could be.

Piesing tends to tease outcomes too much for this reviewer’s taste. That aside, this is a fine book for explaining why men have a tendency to bring down the very thing they’re trying to pump up.

Jeff Schulze

Excerpt from N-4 DOWN No.3…LitHub & CrimeReads: THE AIRSHIP ITALIA: A MYSTERY AT THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF POLAR EXPLORATION

Umberto Nobile took his airships (and his beloved dog) across the Arctic frontier. His legacy is still a mystery.

Check out the third extract used from my new book N-4 DOWN which appeared on CrimeReads and sister site the LitHub in full below, or by following this link.

The book is also featured in the Lit Hub’s 13 new books to add to your TBR pile right now August 31, 2021.

Want to know more?

Read The Wall Street Journal review

Read The Forbes review

Read the New York Journal of Books review

See my talk about N-4 DOWN for New York’s famous The Explorer’s Club here.

Listen to my interview with CBS radio here.

A very pleasing image!

The book smelled old. It must have been sitting on the shelves of the secondhand bookstore for a long time before I bought it. The title was enigmatic: With the Italia to the North Pole. What was the Italia? And who was going to the North Pole? The author was just as mysterious. Who was UmbertoNobile?

I was looking for a mystery to solve—and now I had found one.

When I opened the stiff pages of the ninety-year-old volume to try to find the answers, I felt a slight draft on my hand. An equally old and irregularly cutout newspaper clipping slipped out of the book and fluttered to the floor.

The faded headline of the story answered some of my questions. It read: “Bound for the North Pole. Italian’sBig Adventure. First Day’s Thrilling Experiences.” The story was bylined London, April 16, 1928.

As I fumbled with the book, an old map unfolded itself from the back cover to offer another clue: “Svalbard,” it was titled. Suddenly I could hear the throb of zeppelin engines in my ears.

Svalbard is a tiny group of dots in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Svalbard is described to Lyra, the heroine of the books, as “the farthest, coldest, darkest regions of the wild.” It is a land of “slow-crawling glaciers; of the rock and ice floes where the bright-tusked walruses lay in groups of a hundred or more, of the seas, teeming with seals . . . of the great grim iron-bound coast, the cliffs a thousand feet and more high where the foul cliff-ghasts perched and swooped, the coal pits and fire mines where the bearsmiths hammered out mighty sheets of iron and riveted them into armor.”

It was on Svalbard, I now knew, that I would find answers to my last questions. I caught a Boeing from London via Oslo to Longyearbyen, the “capital” of these remote islands. The two-and-a-half-hour flight time in a modern airliner did make the ends of the earth seem closer. As we dragged our bags across the tarmac to the lonely airport terminal building, the icy wind from the North Pole that cut through our down jackets as if we weren’t even wearing them was a healthy reminder of where we actually were. If that didn’t make us realize how far north we had traveled, on three sides of the tarmac strip were mountains covered in snow, their glaciers glinting fiendishly in the April sunlight. At the end of the runway lay the cold, gray, and deadly waters of the Arctic Ocean itself.

Jutting out of the mountainside above the airport was the gray rectangular entrance to what appeared to be a nuclear bunker. My guess was not far off. It was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a long-term seed storage facility built to stand the test of time—and the challenges of natural or manmade disasters. The seed vault is the world’s guarantee of crop diversity

in the future; whether any survivors of our civilization would be able to reach it is a question we will hopefully never have to answer.

On the drive into town, it felt like we could slip into Lyra’s Svalbard at any time. The mountainsides above the town are covered by the remains of aerial ropeways that once took coal from mines to the harbor; the mine entrances themselves, which are little more than large holes in the side of the mountain; and a handful of forbidding abandoned factories, rumored to host raves. The grim wooden hostels were now bunk rooms for hikers, and the dingy bars they frequented looked as if they’d seen their fair share of fights. The supermarkets warned customers not to bring their guns into the store. I had my picture taken—quickly—by the sign with a polar bear inside a big red triangle on the edge of town. Underneath were the words “Gjelder hele Svalbard,” meaning “applies toall of Svalbard.”

Down by the quayside, past where the scientists monitoring the melting permafrost park their half-tracks, is a small black wooden shack with a sizable wooden cutout of a polar bear looking straight at you. On the front are the words “North Pole Expedition Museum.” Right next to that label is a picture of a zeppelin. Airships had once flown over Svalbard.

Entering the shack is like stepping into a fantasy world. With its faded cuttings, black-and-white pictures typed notes, and shaky newsreel footage, the museum tells the story of the aeronauts who once upon a time explored the unknown lands of the North Pole by hot-air balloon, airship, and primitive airplane. There is a section about Swedish hero Salomon August Andrée, who decided he would try to fly from Svalbard to the North Pole in a balloon. On July 11, 1897, he and his two crewmen took off for the pole, floated over the horizon, and disappeared. It would be another thirty-three years before their skeletons were found.

Another section of the museum is dedicated to the not- so-derring-do of journalist and all-around chancer Walter Wellman. He attempted three times—in 1906, 1907, and 1909—to fly to the North Pole in a sausage-like airship called America. In 1909, the America managed to stay in the air for a couple of hours before it crashed. Despite this further setback, Wellman was determined to return the following year with a larger airship, but he never did. His dream of flying to the North Pole died when he heard of Dr. Frederick Cook’s claim to have reached the pole on foot. Instead, the following year he decided to fly across the Atlantic in the America, an endeavor that met with as much as success as his polar flights.

In truth, the exhibition is really about one man and one type of machine: Umberto Nobile and airships. Prodigy, dirigible engineer, aeronaut, Arctic explorer, member of the Fascist Party, an opponent of Mussolini, maybe even Soviet spy, and always accompanied by his dog, Titina, Nobile twice flew jumbo-jet-size airships—lighter-than-air craft that he designed and built—on the epic journey from Rome to Svalbard to explore the Arctic. The N-4 Italia was the second of these flying machines.

In 1926, a dirigible he built and piloted, the Norge, became the first aircraft to cross the roof of the world from Norway to Alaska. It may even have been the first aircraft to reach the North Pole. His public falling-out with his famous co-leader, Roald Amundsen, over who should take credit for the flight made headlines across the United States—headlines that were perhaps matched only by the news that when Nobile was invited to Washington, Titina, who had flown over the North Pole with him, had relieved herself on the carpet of the White House itself.

In 1928, he ignored all the omens—and all his enemies—to return again to the North Pole in the Italia, but he never did become the first man to land at the pole from an airship. The crash of his vessel out there on the pack ice made front-page news around the world. The disappearance of many of his men was a mystery that has never been solved, with rumors of cannibalism never fully disproved. His treatment at the hands of Mussolini when he eventually returned to Rome was compared by his supporters to that of Alfred Dreyfus by the French government at the end of the nineteenth century.

This book, then, is the story of Nobile, his friends and enemies, their expeditions, and the airships and airplanes they flew, of the end of the golden age of polar exploration—that era when the pilot replaced the tough man of Arctic exploration in the public imagination and when the zeppelin and the airplane battled it out in the Arctic skies for the future of aviation, a time when some countries even considered banning aviation altogether because it was so dangerous. It is the story of some of the women, such as millionaire Louise Boyd, who up till now have been written out of the tale. It is a story that incorporates the rise of fascism and the struggle against it. It is also the story of a moment in time when many people thought there was a lost continent hidden at the North Pole behind the ice and fog.

Today, in Bedford, United Kingdom, in Paris, in California, and in Jingmen,China, a new generation of airship engineer, pilot, and dreamer is looking to explore the Arctic skies once more.

In Kings Bay, hundreds of miles to the north of Longyearbyen, a huge metal mooring mast was erected to secure Umberto Nobile’s airships. It stands there waiting, still, for the explorers and their airships to return again.

___________________________________

From N-4 Down by Mark Piesing. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Piesing. Reprinted by permission of Custom House, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpt from N-4 DOWN No.2…engadget: Hitting the Books: A look at the 1920s airship that nearly made it to the North Pole

What pilot wouldn’t want to ride through the middle of the arctic circle in an open-air cockpit?

It was great to have an excerpt of my new book N-4 DOWN: the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia published in the excellent engadget.

Read the excerpt in full below, or the original by following this link.

You might also be interested in

Reading Robert S. Davis’s excellent review of N-4 DOWN in The New York Journal of Books by clicking on this link.

Watching my talk for The Explorer’s Club (New York)

Listening to my 44 min interview on CBS Radio Eye on the World with John Batchelor

Reading the extract of my book that Crimereads published.

Reading the extract of my book that The Daily Beast published.

Purchasing the book here

During the Roaring ’20s just about everybody was convinced that dirigibles were not just the future of luxury travel but that these lumbering airships could also serve as platforms for scientific exploration and adventure. Why slog through malaria-infested jungles, parched deserts and frozen tundra when you could simply float an expedition to its destination? Among the technology’s most fervent adherents were famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and Italian airship designer General Umberto Nobile. In 1928, Nobile attempted to lead the first expedition to land people at the North Pole aboard Airship Italia. However, a brutal storm forced the vessel to crash land, stranding its survivors with precious few provisions and setting off the largest arctic rescue effort in history. 

N-4 Down, by journalist and author Mark Piesing chronicles that rescue effort, led by Amundsen himself. In the excerpt below, we get a quick look at just what level of technological prowess the crew of the ill-fated expedition were actually dealing with.

Andrew Tarantola, Senior Editor

From N-4 Down by Mark Piesing. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Piesing. Reprinted by permission of Custom House, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Amundsen may have dreamed of multiple air bases in the Arctic Circle, but in 1925 his was one of the only ones. It consisted of two flying boats, no hangars, and a rough runway made from ice.

For the flight he had a team of six men who would be split between the two planes. Lincoln Ellsworth would be in one, Amundsen in the other. The Norwegian had also brought with him for the first time two journalists and a photographer to record the expedition.

The flying boats that Amundsen transported from Pisa, Italy, weren’t just any flying boats. The N-24 and N-25 were state-of-the-art Dornier Do J “whale” flying boats, which went on to pioneer many air routes across the world.

These expensive German-designed machines were cutting edge in 1925. This meant that they were all metal, with a whale-shaped hull and high, raised wings. Two stub wings, known as sponsons, kept the plane stable, while ribs on the hull gave the plane the strength to land on sea or ice. Two chunky Rolls-Royce Eagle propeller engines were arranged back to back: one to pull the plane through the air and the other to push it. The Eagle engines were the first aeroengines that Rolls-Royce ever built.

Alas, the pilots were still housed in an unheated open-air cockpit, obliged to wear woolen underwear, sweaters, two pairs of pants, a sealskin greatcoat as well as a leather jacket, a leather flying helmet, gloves, scarves, and heavy boots to stay warm while flying at high speeds. They all had a parachute (one of the conditions Ellsworth’s father made him agree to in exchange for his money), though the terrible battle to survive they would face if their parachutes worked was something it was better not to think about.

The state of aerial navigation wasn’t much better. Pilots, who still who relied on distinguishing features such as railways, rivers, and castles to help them work out where they were going, were always going to be challenged by the featureless and shifting Arctic landscape. As mariners had done for the last two hundred year, sextants could be used to determine their aircraft’s altitude, position, and ground speed. These sextants were of less use, of course, when visibility was blocked by fog or thick clouds. Then these early pilots could use a magnetic compass, which becomes less reliable the closer to the North Pole the aircraft flies, or a solar compass, which worked like a sundial by using the position of the sun to establish a bearing (particularly useful near the North Pole).

Radio had started to challenge these far older methods of navigation. Radio direction finding allowed a navigator to find the direction to a radio station, or beacon. Then if you could pick up the signals of two or more stations, or beacons, then you could work out where you were by simple triangulation. Airplane navigators had to take all these readings in conditions that didn’t lend themselves to accuracy, taking measurements and keeping records in what was usually a freezing cold — and sometimes open — cockpit in a noisy and unstable machine.

Unfortunately for the crew of his new expedition, the Amundsen of 1925 was not the Amundsen who beat Scott to the South Pole. It could be said that he had lost his eye for detail.

The planes had been test flown in the Mediterranean before they were shipped by train and boat to Kings Bay. What they hadn’t been was properly test flown in the below-freezing conditions of the Arctic. In 1925, no one really understood how these flimsy aircraft and their internal combustion engines would cope with the cold of the Arctic, and Amundsen didn’t seem particularly curious about the possible distinction. Then there were the sextants that didn’t work and the radio sets that hadn’t arrived yet, and which Amundsen decided they couldn’t wait for. Finally, Amundsen didn’t formulate any emergency procedures in the event that one of the planes had to land. Without the radios, there was no way for the crews to talk to each other midflight if something went wrong. He had compounded this risk by turning down the US Navy’s offer of the giant airship USS Shenandoah to act as a rescue ship the year before. But he did remember to take a moving-picture camera with them.

Amundsen’s haste was due to his worry that a narrow window in the Arctic weather was set to close. There was also the nagging fear that someone else would fly to the North Pole before him.

Finally, on May 21, 1925, after one last leisurely, rather staged cigarette to calm their nerves, and with a final shove of the plane from the miners — who were given the day off for the occasion — the two overloaded planes roared one after the other across the rough-ice runway like toboggans, the crews feeling every bump in the ice through the flying boats’ metal hull, then out on to the water and into the air. “It was unreal, mystic, fraught with prophecy,” Ellsworth wrote. “Something ahead was hidden, and we were going to find it.”

The low-lying fog quickly cleared. The film that the crew shot of the glaciers of Svalbard comprised the first images ever taken from the air of these rivers of ice.

Amundsen’s dream of flying over the Arctic Sea was realized. The explorers were covering in hours what would take a week to do with dogs and skis. “I have never seen anything more desolate and deserted,” Amundsen remarked. “A bear from time to time I would have thought, which could break the monotony a little. But no—absolutely nothing living.”

After eight hours, they should have been near the North Pole, and the plan was to try to land. But one of the engines of Amundsen’s plane started to splutter on their descent. It quickly became apparent that they had to land rather sooner than they wanted.

“I have never looked down upon a more terrifying place in which to land an airplane,” Ellsworth wrote. For what had looked like smooth ice from high altitude turned out to be cut by ridges, gaps of open water called leads, and icebergs.

Amundsen’s plane made it down safely thanks to the skills of his pilot. Ellsworth’s was not so lucky. His plane eventually found a stretch of water they too could land on. Unfortunately, distances are deceptive at that height and what had seemed long enough was too short. Ellsworth’s plane bounced across the surface of the sea and smashed into an ice floe. Water poured in. That the rivets on the hull had burst due to the rough takeoff only added to their problems.

Soon there was nothing Ellsworth and his men could do to rescue it; the flying boat floated there like a dead whale. Ellsworth’s men were cold and wet, and they had been awake for twenty-four hours. They needed rest and food, but there wouldn’t be any of either for a while. They had to try their best to protect the plane from being crushed by the ice or sinking while they tried to salvage what they could. Eventually they stopped, exhausted—and the peril Ellsworth and his men were in suddenly hit him. “In the utter silence this seemed to me to be the kingdom of death,” he wrote.

The two crews were now separated from each other by many miles. It was twenty-four hours before they spotted each other across the ice pack.

Even when they were in sight of each other, communication across the ice was hampered because no one knew Morse code or semaphore. Instead, the two crews managed to get a rudimentary flag system going between them. It took two to three hours to communicate a simple message. Walking across the ice wasn’t an option either. It was simply too dangerous.

They were lucky in the end. The blocks of sea ice floated closer together, making it possible for the crews to be reunited after five interminable days. This still wasn’t without risk. Attempts by the men to walk across the ice floes with as much equipment as possible nearly ended in disaster when two of them sank through the slush into the freezing water. One of the men screamed, “I’m gone! I’m gone,” as the current tried to pull him under the ice.

Amundsen looked shockingly changed, exhaustion and anxiety cut deep into his face, but he was now back in the world of the ice pack, a world he knew so well. Quickly he took control. He realized that they had to combine the supplies from both planes to give themselves a chance of survival. More important, perhaps, they were able to siphon the fuel out of Ellsworth’s plane to give them enough to reach home again with the heavier load of all the men on board. But before they could attempt this, they first needed to carve a runway out of the ice. Of course, they hadn’t brought any specialized tools with them, despite having planned to land at the North Pole.

Without radio contact, the world first suspected that something had gone wrong when the planes didn’t return to Kings Bay straight away. Even then, some people thought that the aviators could have stayed at the pole for a couple of days or even flown on to Alaska, as Amundsen had long wanted to do. Some remembered conversations where Ellsworth had said it might take a year for them to walk out of the wilderness if their plane crashed.

When nothing was heard from them, newspapers across America started to report that the planes were overdue. There were demands for a rescue effort to be launched. But the lack of ships, planes, airships, and any idea of where Amundsen and his men had crashed presented would-be rescuers with a fearsome challenge. Still, the pressure was there. One headline in the New York Times proclaimed, “Coolidge Favors Amundsen Relief Should He Need It; President Would Approve Naval Plan to Send One of Our Giant Dirigibles to the Arctic.”

The US Navy was keen to launch its own expedition to rescue Amundsen. Two years earlier, naval plans to explore the Arctic with one of its huge dirigibles had been canceled owing to the expense. Now they were pushing the president to dispatch the giant USS Shenandoah or USS Los Angeles airships to search for Amundsen. Either of the two ships could be ready in days for the mission, sources told the New York Times journalist. The flight itself to Greenland (a possible base for the mission) would then take a couple of days, depending on the weather and where the ships were based at that time. “Practically, every officer connected with the aeronautical service of the Navy will volunteer in the event that a call for help is made on behalf of Amundsen,” the reporter explained.

Excerpt from N-4 DOWN No.1…The Daily Beast: Roald Amundsen Didn’t Reach the Poles by Being a Nice Guy

The first man to reach the South Pole had sharp elbows and thought nothing about crossing friends and mentors. But no one disputed that he was a fearless and intrepid explorer.

It was great to have an excerpt of my new book N-4 DOWN: the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia published in the excellent The Daily Beast.

Read the extract in full below, or the original by clicking on this link.

You might also be interested in

Reading Robert S. Davis’s excellent review of N-4 DOWN in The New York Journal of Books by clicking on this link.

Watching my talk for The Explorer’s Club (New York)

Listening to my 44 min interview on CBS Radio Eye on the World with John Batchelor

Reading the extract of my book that Crimereads published.

Reading the extract of my book that Engadget published.

Purchasing the book here

The great polar explorer Roald Amundsen stood by himself on the frozen Arctic shore, staring into the distance. He was fifty-three years old—but looked seventy-five—and bankrupt.

On the ice in front of him, the men of the Amundsen-Ellsworth polar flight had broken open the large, long wooden crates that contained the two flying boats. Now their job was to reassemble the craft, laboring in subzero temperatures with little more than a block and tackle, the coal miners from the Kings Bay Mine ready to provide the muscle power when they needed it. Nearby, a journalist and photographer recorded their every move.

Beautiful white mountains penned Amundsen in on three sides. Their glaciers glinted in the May sunlight. For a moment, the twenty-two houses of the mining village looked more like holiday cottages.

“The Arctic smiles now, but behind the silent hills is death,” another journalist would later write, and he would be proved right.

Out in the bay, the sea was filled with great chunks of ice. Beyond stretched the endless, empty ice pack, known as the Arctic desert, a huge empty hole on the map of the world roughly the size of Canada that had never before been explored. Somewhere on the other side was Alaska.

How Do You Win the Race to the North Pole? You Cheat.GREAT AMERICAN SCANDALSAllison McNearney

Men quickly became invisible from the air in this brilliant white landscape. If their primitive flying machines descended and they couldn’t get back up, then there was almost no likelihood that they would be found. Even if someone knew where they were, there would be a good chance that they had strayed beyond the range of their would-be rescuers, particularly if they were the crew of a dirigible. These lighter-than-air craft could stay in the air for days at a time and fly much farther than their fixed-wing aircraft rivals.

The sea ice that makes up the ice pack could be many feet thick, and then suddenly only half an inch thick, ready to plunge the unwary—or too hasty—explorer into the frozen water underneath. Nighttime might not bring much relief to the explorer either. The cracking and creaking of the ice could keep many a man from sleeping, no matter how exhausted they were, their bodies braced for the moment when they—and their tent—might suddenly be plunged into the icy water below. Then there was the disorientation. When they woke up, they could be as many as twenty miles from where they had gone to sleep.“Amundsen’s decision to use huskies, which were bred for these conditions, on his race to the South Pole was the difference between his life and Scott’s death.”

To crash out there would in all likelihood mean death, though surprisingly this didn’t seem to bother the average adventurer. This was their choice: to be noticed, to be remembered. Glory and fame were what most of them had come there for—and one way or another, they were determined to get it.

Welcome to the Svalbard archipelago.

To locate these mountainous islands on a map, you first have to find Scotland, then trace your finger up past Iceland, Norway, and Greenland. From the map, it looks as though you could swim—or even march—from the islands to Greenland, Canada, Alaska, or Russia. But of course you can’t: the distances are still vast, the passages grim and unwelcoming.

All Amundsen needed, he kept telling himself as he stood out there, was one last big paycheck.

It was 1925: twenty years since the Norwegian had become the first man to successfully navigate his way through the Northwest Passage, the sea route from the Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. Sir John Franklin and his 128 men had disappeared around sixty years previously to this trying to make the same journey in two old warships.* Amundsen had done it slowly with six men over three years in an old fishing boat. That journey had been surpassed six years later when Amundsen beat the British hero Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole in 1911. Scott and his four companions died on their way back from the pole. Amundsen had arrived first at the South Pole after claiming to be heading to the Arctic Ocean. He had kept his “coup” secret from most of the crew on the voyage from Norway to Portugal, the politicians funding him (whom he detested after they had rejected his plea for more money), the government that owned his ship, and the king of Norway himself. He had even betrayed the trust of his Norwegian mentor, Fridtjof Nansen, who had his eye on the same prize. The fate of others was not much of a concern to Amundsen.

Captain Roald Amundsen at the South pole under the Norwegian flag, 1912

Amundsen’s decision to use huskies, which were bred for these conditions, on his race to the South Pole was the difference between his life and Scott’s death. The Englishman’s choice of ponies and gasoline engine tractors, which were untested in such extreme conditions, had condemned him to second place—and, ultimately, him and his men to their deaths. Yet Amundsen had refused to see Scott when the Brit visited Norway to watch a demonstration of the mechanical tractors prior to his journey to the pole. The Norwegian had kept his doubts to himself. Amundsen didn’t get to be a world-famous Arctic explorer by being “nice.”

The Norwegian was also savvier than his English rival. Both Frederick Cook’s claim to have reached the North Pole on foot in April 1908 and Robert Peary’s a year later were swiftly doubted at the time. Despite the rather dubious support of more than fifty psychics, the question mark over Cook’s claim was so strong that he was widely seen as a fraud, and his career was ruined. The scandals that surrounded the “achievements” of these men then threatened to taint the claim of every explorer, and Amundsen was quick to realize this. When he set off for the South Pole, he made sure he would not suffer the same fate as these two men. Amundsen listened to the experts who explained why Cook’s and Peary’s navigation left their achievements open to doubt. Conversely, Scott ignored their advice. Amundsen then used the latest navigational know-how to make sure accurate records of the route of his expedition were regularly taken and kept as evidence that he had reached the South Pole. Scott used the traditional methods, which were slower, exhausting in such extreme conditions, and less accurate. He paid the price for his decision.

When Amundsen and his men arrived at the South Pole in December 1911, they didn’t sing a patriotic anthem, give a speech, or indulge in any other unmanly histrionics. Instead, the Norwegians simply read a passage from the nineteenth-century version of the medieval Saga of Fridtjof, a celebration of traditional, heroic masculinity, which had been incredibly popular when it was published but was now fading from memory.

Amundsen Expedition: Proving themselves at the South Pole by use of sextant and artificial horizon. Captain Roald Amundsen discovered South Pole on December 14-17, 1911.

However, the challenges Amundsen faced didn’t end when he sailed back home. A life spent at the extremes of the world, in the close company of men, and shifting between the rooms of luxury hotels and the snow and ice of both poles, had not been conducive to any hopes that Amundsen may have had of marriage. Instead, he satisfied himself with affairs with several married women, the wives of powerful men in the towns and cities he passed through. Indeed, Amundsen wasn’t alone in this. Many of his fellow explorers also struggled to settle down. In the absence of any children of his own, Amundsen had adopted two Inuit girls a few years earlier, in spite of the gossips who wondered who their real father was, but controversially sent them back to Siberia when he faced bankruptcy.

* In 2014 and 2016, the wrecks of HMS Erebus and Terror were finally discovered. While the fate of the survivors is still clouded in mystery, it is now thought that the expedition had managed to explore the unexplored part of the Northwest Passage. However, the ships and their ghosts have one more duty to perform to their country: The shipwrecks are helping Canada reinforce its claim to the Arctic in the face of competition from countries like Russia.

From N-4 Down by Mark Piesing. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Piesing. Reprinted by permission of Custom House, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

I have been on the radio in the USA!

Photo: “Inventio fortunata. Arctic exploration. With an account of Nicholas of Lynn. Read before the American Geographical Society … May 15th, 1880. Reprinted from the Bulletin of the Society”.

Last month, I had a great chat with American journalist John Batchelor about my newly published book N-4 Down: the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia.

The result of our conversation was broadcast on the hard news analysis radio show CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor on Friday 17, September.

You can listen to our 40-minute chat here in 4 parts

New York Journal of Books Review…N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia

“Mark Piesing in N-4 Down explores the least remembered of this forgotten era: the story of Roald Amundsen, Umberto Nobile, and their airship adventures in the Arctic.”

Read. Robert S. Davis excellent review of my new book N-4 DOWN in The New York Journal of Books in full below, or by clicking on this link.

You might also be interested in

Watching my talk for The Explorer’s Club (New York)

Listening to my appearance on Bruce Dorminey’s Cosmic Controversy podcast.

Reading the extract of my book that Crimereads published.

Purchasing the book here.

“Today the huge cigar-shaped airships of the early twentieth century seem to be artifacts of a lost civilization.” People flew dirigibles across the Atlantic in luxury, zeppelins bombed London, and blimps hunted for enemy submarines. This mode of transportation, like private space travel, proved dangerous (e. g. the Hindenburg) expensive, technically challenging, and impractical—but it was a beautiful dream.

Mark Piesing in N-4 Down explores the least remembered of this forgotten era: the story of Roald Amundsen, Umberto Nobile, and their airship adventures in the Arctic, “one of the greatest aeronautical feats of all time.” Almost half of the book prepares the reader with sufficient background for the gripping telling of the story of the crash of N-4 Italia and the deadly attempt at rescue.

Aeronauts “once upon a time explored the unknown lands of the North Pole” at the risk to and sometimes the cost of their lives. In “a time when some countries even considered banning aviation altogether because it was so dangerous,” “the zeppelin and the airplane battled it out in the Arctic skies for the future of aviation.”

In 1897, “Swedish hero Solomon August Andrée” and two crewmen tried to fly from the “gates of the North Pole” “Svalbard to the North Pole in a balloon.”  “It would be another thirty-three years before, their skeletons were found.”

Other explorers paved the way for Arctic aviation. Walter Wellman made unsuccessful attempts to reach the North Pole in his airship America from 1906 to 1909 and Polish aviator Jan Nagórski “became the first to pilot an airplane successfully in the Arctic.” American Admiral William Byrd claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole in an aircraft, but his claims are disputed.

The great character in the story of the disastrous last flight of N-4 Italia in 1928 is the famed polar Roald Amundsen. He had already achieved the first to pass through the Northwest Passage and the first to reach the South Pole.

Amundsen next set out to achieve aviation success in the Arctic but “he and his fellow explorers had little knowledge of mechanics.” “Death and humiliation seemed to be the fate of those who tried” Arctic aviation. Amundsen went bankrupt financing his first two airplanes, each of which crashed early on.

As a backstory, Amundsen’s Norway had gained independence only in 1905 and, coming late to the
“Great Game” of imperialism, sought to build “a new empire of snow and ice, an empire hacked out of the frozen land by the Norwegian men” through “air stations and bases.” Germany, Russia, Sweden, and other nations also vied for the coal discovered in the polar Svalbard Islands.

The Arctic of that time loomed large in the media and the public’s imagination. More than 1,000 men died trying to reach the North Pole by various means. It had “real-life mysteries such as the disappearance of the Franklin expedition” but some people also readily believed “tales of wondrous lands and terrifying encounters” with the devil, cannibalism, ghosts, ghouls, hallucinations, mirages, and other phenomena. “The stories . . . shaped future explorers’ own expectations.”

Such background makes the detailed account of Amundsen’s and Nobile’s adventures so much more than high adventure in a deadly, unforgiving environment. Amundsen and his partner Lincoln Ellsworth, for example, had harrowing adventures in a failed effort to fly to the North Pole in special flying boats.

In 1925, Amundsen turned to Neapolitan adventurer, aristocrat, engineer, explorer, and more Umberto Nobile for an airship that could cross the Arctic. Nobile had become involved in an international race to build the biggest such aircraft, to establish airlines, and, now, in the race to fly the first aircraft to the North Pole.

This journey risked a possible deadly crash or “a year spent walking back to civilization over the sea ice.” For Nobile, failure to reach Alaska meant “failure for him, his family, and for Fascist Italy.” He offered the use of airship to Amundsen and Ellsworth for free “if it flew the Italian flag.”

These adventurers discovered that their comfortable stable airship the Norge proved “the ideal platform for polar exploration” but also “how dangerous a crash landing would be.” Unlike an airplane, engine repairs could be made without landing but maintenance work outside the ship, in cold, ice, and wind, could prove deadly. The last leg of their journey nearly proved fatal for the Norge as it crash landed in Alaska.

On May 12, 1926, the passengers on the Norge became the first people, indisputably, to have reached the North Pole. Amundsen now held the record of the first person to have been to both poles and Nobile “had shown the world what airships could do.” They established that the Arctic is a sea devoid of almost all land.

“The age of the polar explorer [Amundsen] was over and the age of the aeronaut [Nobile] had begun.” That proved particularly ironic, as Amundsen a pilot, had pioneered Arctic aviation and the story of Nobile’s later airship the N-4 Italia.

Nubile and Amundsen had fought over everything including national prestige and possible profits. An argument ensued over how many Norwegians would accompany the expedition as opposed to Italians.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini publically proclaimed the success of the venture for his country and the subsequent international acclaim for Nobile widened the disdain that Amundsen held for the airship engineer.

In 1928, when Nobile and his crew disappeared with the airship N-4 Italia over the Arctic, a retired and critically ill Amundsen still set out by plane on a rescue mission. The old school Arctic explorer and his companion never returned although Nobile and five other survivors of the Italia were eventually rescued after several harrowing days on the ice.

N-4 Down is an engrossing read where the author seamlessly tells a great adventure including adequate background but without distraction from his storyline. It makes a fast and engaging read. This scholarship has annotation.

Robert S. Davis is an award-winning senior professor of genealogy, geography, and history. His writing credits include more than 1,000 contributions as books, articles, and reviews in historical, library, education, and archival journals related to the South. He is also a frequent speaker.

The Forbes review: When Airships Raced To Conquer The Arctic

Check out science journalist Bruce Dorminey’s excellent Forbes review of my first book N-4 DOWN: the search for the Arctic airship Italia in full below, or by clicking on this link.

You might also be interested in

Watch my talk for The Explorer’s Club (New York)

Listen to my appearance on Bruce Dorminey’s Cosmic Controversy podcast.

Purchase the book here.

The Arctic has always had an almost mystical appeal to anyone who’s studied geography; up until the early part of the 20th century, it was basically unexplored territory —- a vast ever-shifting, ice-pack desert. 

But “N-4 Down:  The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia” by U.K. journalist Mark Piesing quickly points out the potential that exploring such nether regions using dirigibles offered early 20th century explorers. 

Piesing hooks us in his introduction when describing his arrival in Longyearbyen, the de facto capital of the remote Svalbard Islands which served as a jumping off point for many of these expeditions. 

“…on three sides of the tarmac strip were mountains covered in snow, their glaciers glinting fiendishly in the April sunlight,” Piesing writes. “At the end of the runway lay the cold, gray, and deadly waters of the Arctic Ocean itself.”

The prime focus of “N-4 Down” is the tragic plight of Umberto Nobile’s airship Italia expedition to the North pole in the spring of 1928. In compelling prose, Piesing draws us into the feverish efforts to conquer the Arctic by air. Although the American explorer Richard Byrd and the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen were household names at the time, a long-forgotten Italian engineer, explorer and airship designer named Umberto Nobile arguably deserves equal credit for his contributions to arctic exploration. 

Most of all, “N-4 Down” takes us back to an era in the first third of the 20th century that saw an explosion in all sorts of exploration. Not only was there great interest in fully exploring the four corners of the Earth including the North and South poles, but there was a vitality about aeronautics and aviation of the era that served to supercharge the human spirit. 

N-4 Down COURTESY HARPER-COLLINS

In 1926, celebrated Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen went into a partnership with Nobile to be the first-ever to fly over the North Pole in an airship. Thus, the N-1, or Norge, as it was christened, became the first aircraft to cross the ‘roof of the world’ from Norway to Alaska, writes Piesing. 

But there was bad blood between Nobile and Amundsen after this expedition. Thus, Nobile was determined to return to the north pole with a plan to walk upon the ice in an airship dubbed the Italia. 

With a crew of 16, Nobile and the Italia reached the North pole on the morning of May 24, 1928. The plan had been to descend to 160 feet and drop a patented sky anchor. From there, Nobile was to have descended in a pneumatic basket clutching an Italian flag. However, high wind prevented this maneuver and the crew was only able to drop two flags and a catholic cross onto the ice before the airship developed grave operational problems. 

Nobile’s Airbus A-380 sized airship crashed on the morning of May 25, 1928 less than 200 miles from a triumphant return to the Svalbard Islands. Nobile and several of his crew subsequently survived on the ice for several weeks before their improbable rescue. If not for a makeshift radio that one of the crew hobbled together from the wreckage of the airship, the story of the Italia would have been a complete tragedy. But early radio as pioneered by the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi was already well advanced by the late 1920s for use in marine navigation particularly.   

One of the Italia crew broadcast an ‘SOS’ signal five minutes before the top of each hour until the operator basically collapsed due to exhaustion. Incredibly, an amateur ham radio operator in northern Siberia happened to hear the Italia’s SOS and subsequently notified the authorities and the Italia support ship Citta di Milano which was stationed in the Svalbard Islands. Soon a rescue icebreaker and aircraft were en route to drop supplies and pick up what remained of the crew. In short, the saga of the Italia is a miraculous story of human survival.

Umberto Nobile overseeing the moving of the Airship Italia, from L’Illustrazione Italiana, Year LV, … [+] DEA / BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA

“N-4 Down” in large part because it is refreshingly well-written. So often these days, books tend to be published by historians and researchers who are experts in their fields but who can’t turn a phrase. So, it was a pleasure to be captivated by a working journalist like Piesing’s ability to put together a swath of prose that actually made me want to turn the page. 

Piesing’s narrative latches hold in part because although we live in an era in which there’s a lot of talk about pushing the limit of aerospace exploration, it’s been decades years since Amelia Earhart, Richard Byrd and Amundsen routinely risked their lives for the sake of aeronautical exploration. 

For his part, Amundsen, who happened to be in the Svalbard Islands at the time of the Italia’s disappearance took off by plane to search for Nobile and the airship. But Amundsen’s search went badly awry and he himself went missing, with neither his body nor aircraft ever found. 

Despite such tragedies, “N-4 Down” makes one wonder why airships are not in greater practical use today. Piesing deserves credit for bringing this forgotten bit of aerospace history back to light.