Mike Houlahan reviews Umberton Nobile and the Arctic Search for the Airship 'Italia' by Garth Cameron. Published by Fonthill Media.
As Dunedin lawyer Garth Cameron notes at the start of this book, airships are complex things.
So is writing a book about the great many perils attached to flying them.
Pioneering aviation was a hazardous enterprise, and Italian designer and pilot Umberto Nobile was at the heart of the earliest triumphs and tragedies of the fledgling airship industry.
He designed and piloted the airship Norge, the first aircraft to fly across the North Pole from Europe to America.
However, Nobile also designed and flew the Italia, which crashed in the midst of another Arctic expedition.
Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, disappeared while taking part in the world's first polar search and rescue operation for the Italia's crew.
Nobile was a larger-than-life character full of his own complexities, and Cameron has a tricky flight in telling his story - he has to jettison enough ballast in terms of science and technical material to make this biography accessible for the general reader, but also needs to have enough facts and figures to make Nobile's achievements and failures comprehensible.
Mostly, Cameron, a lawyer who specialises in aviation, keeps a level heading and avoids turbulence.
Despite having a glossary, appendices and copious endnotes, Cameron has written a very readable account of airship history and Umberto Nobile's part in it: there is seldom the need to refer to other parts of the book so the layperson can grasp what is going on.
However, the extensive auxiliary material means the Italia expedition only takes up a third of the book, albeit the pivotal third.
As a result the expedition, and as a result Nobile himself, seem almost peripheral at times.
There were further depths for Cameron to explore, most notably the conflicted personality of Umberto Nobile himself - a man who conspicuously cared for his stricken crew, but who also allowed himself and the fox terrier he took everywhere with him to be rescued before any other member of the doomed Italia.
Umberto Nobile and the Arctic Search for the Airship 'Italia' is an enjoyable and worthwhile read, but at its end I craved for an extra hundred pages or so for Cameron to explore the contradictions of the expedition leader and offer more detail of the disasters which befell him and his crew in the Arctic Circle.
Mike Houlahan is an ODT health reporter.
