The airship Italia, commanded by General Umberto Nobile, crashed during its return flight from the North Pole in 1928. The cause of the accident was never satisfactorily explained. We present evidence that the crash may have been fatigue-related. Nobile's memoirs indicate that at the time of the crash he had been awake for at least 72 h. Sleep deprivation impairs multiple aspects of cognitive functioning necessary for exploration missions. Just prior to the crash, Nobile made three command errors, all of which are of types associated with inadequate sleep. First, he ordered a release of lift gas when he should have restarted engines (an example of incorrect data synthesis, with deterioration of divergent thinking); second, he inappropriately ordered the ship above the cloud layer (a deficiency in the assessment of relative risks); and third, he remained above the cloud layer for a prolonged period of time (examples of attention to secondary problems, and calculation problems). We argue that as a result of these three errors, which would not be expected from such an experienced commander, there was no longer enough static lift to maintain level flight when the ship went below the cloud layer. Applying Circadian Performance Simulation Software to the sleep–wake patterns described by Nobile in his memoirs, we found that the predicted performance for someone awake as long as he had been is extremely low. This supports the historical evidence that human fatigue contributed to the crash of the Italia.

中文翻译：

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人体疲劳与意大利飞艇坠毁

1928 年，翁贝托·诺比莱 (Umberto Nobile) 将军指挥的“意大利”号飞艇在从北极返回途中坠毁。事故原因一直没有得到令人满意的解释。我们提供的证据表明事故可能与疲劳有关。诺比尔的回忆录表明，事故发生时他至少已经清醒了 72 小时。睡眠不足会损害探索任务所需的认知功能的多个方面。就在坠机之前，诺比尔犯了三个命令错误，所有这些错误都与睡眠不足有关。首先，他在应该重新启动发动机时下令释放升力气体（这是一个错误数据合成的例子，导致发散性思维恶化）；其次，他不恰当地命令船舶在云层上方（相对风险评估的缺陷）；第三，他在云层之上停留了很长一段时间（注意次要问题和计算问题的例子）。我们认为，由于这三个错误，当舰艇进入云层以下时，不再有足够的静态升力来维持水平飞行，这对于一位经验丰富的指挥官来说是不可能发生的。将昼夜节律表现模拟软件应用于 Nobile 在他的回忆录中描述的睡眠-觉醒模式，我们发现，对于一个醒着的人来说，预测的表现非常低。这支持了人类疲劳导致意大利号坠毁的历史证据。