Jack Danylchuk
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 19/05) - Imagine an airship, big as a football field and as familiar to Northern skies as Twin Otters, ferrying construction material to build a diamond mine in Nunavut or lifting pipe for the Mackenzie Gas Project.

The image comes easily to Barry Prentice, director of the University of Manitoba Transport Institute.

The Institute hosted its third annual symposium on Airships to the Arctic in June, gathering developers, climate experts, northern Manitoba communities, shippers for mining, energy, food products, construction and the military.

But skeptics are doubtful airships can ever be more than flying billboards or a quick thrill for curious tourists.

Prentice acknowledges there are big technical problems to overcome, but argues climate change assures airships a role in Northern transportation. He compares the North to Western Canada before the railroad and suggested government might finance development of the next generation of airships.

"Airships are a tool for economic development in an area where there are few roads," he said.

There was no one on the guest list from Nunavut or the Northwest Territories, where transportation planners are generally aware that airships might be an option, but aren't about to abandon what they know best, such as semi-tractor trailers driving over ice roads or transport planes.

In the face of a winter too mild to run trucks over ice roads, an airlift by conventional aircraft is the first alternative that occurs to Donny Robinson, vice-president of Northern operations at RTL Robinson. Robinson has made a very profitable business supplying Northern mines.

"There's lots of ingenious stuff out there," said Robinson, "but at the end of the day it's how many dollars per tonne does somebody have to pay to get their freight?"

Robinson estimates the per-tonne cost of aircraft at two or three times the price for trucking supplies to the mines. He wonders who will risk money on the new generation of airships.

Airships have come a long way since the Hindenburg went down in flames in 1937 in New Jersey, ending dreams that they would succeed ocean liners on Trans-Atlantic travel. They did yeoman service in the Second World War, and in the last 50 years have become a familiar sight over NFL football games.

The Zeppelin company has a new airship, with an airframe of carbon fibre and a skin laminated from space-age materials, the latest engine design and modern avionics. The largest of Zeppelin's new airships is 225 feet long and 30 feet wide. It has 8.5 tonnes of lift and carries 12 passengers.

An airship with 80 tonnes of lift - roughly twice the capacity of the world's largest cargo aircraft - would be about the size of the Hindenburg. Eight hundred feet long and 135 feet wide, with a top speed of about 125 kph and a range of 400 km, it would cost about $50 million.

Apart from development costs, airships face some logistical problems: they can't operate in winds above 55 km/h. Federal transport regulations require that they have a hangar large enough to shelter their bulk.

And then there is the question of ballast, or how to control an airship when it is flying empty.

Hokan Colting, chief executive officer of 21st Century Airships Inc., expects to have a patented answer to the buoyancy issue when the Ontario company unveils a new proof-of-concept vehicle in 12 to 18 months.

"People can talk as much as they want, but until you can demonstrate how it works, you won't get the big sales," said Colting, whose company has demonstrated and sold a high altitude airship to a U.S. military contractor.

Went bankrupt

"There have been a number of concepts for heavy cargo airships," Holting said, offering the example of the CargoLifter 160, the brainchild of German designers. "They burned up $375 million euros and went bankrupt without building a single flying prototype."

Capable of lifting up to two tonnes and being scaled up to handle 40 tonnes or more, 21st Century's new airship might be the answer for the dozens of companies that have called Colting looking for a product to buy. "I've had many calls from companies looking for something capable of moving oil rigs, from pipeline builders or for installing windmills," he said.

Government might step in after a successful demonstration, but Colting thinks the development money is more likely to come from end-users.