Big balloons prescribed as cheap cure for what ails Nunavut

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS

Transportation experts and businesses predict giant airships – shaped like balloons or cigars and standing up to six storeys high – will provide Nunavut with a much-needed breakthrough in developing its sluggish economy.

Companies around the world are testing new airships buoyed by helium, which they expect will eventually be able to haul up to 500 tonnes of cargo or people, at a fraction of the cost of plane travel.

Transportation analysts say that within five years, the state-of-the-art airships will bring a transportation revolution to northern areas where shipping expenses weigh heavily on the cost of living.

“It took us a while to get over the giggle factor,” said Barry Prentice, a professor and director of the Transport Institute at the University of Manitoba. “What airships actually hold for Nunavut and all the North is the opportunity to become part of the rest of the world economy.

“It’s very hard for the North to be plugged into the rest of the economy when you don’t have the transportation costs to allow you to compete.”

Prentice is hosting a conference called “Airships to the Arctic” in Winnipeg at the end of the month. The annual meeting runs May 31 to June 2 and involves around 80 delegates from the university, businesses, and northern First Nations communities. Nanulik MLA Patterk Netser is the only Nunavut participant scheduled to attend.

The main attraction of airships comes from their ability to travel anywhere in any season – even in temperatures below -50 C. Their light-weight frame means the helium is enough to carry an empty airship, without the major fuel expenses required to put a plane in the air.

Miners take interest in airship development

The buzz around airships has caught the attention of mining companies, which are desperate for ways of reducing their transportation expenses in the North.

Later this month Abraham Drost, president of Sabina Resources, will give a speech at the “Airships to the Arctic” conference in Winnipeg about what the mining industry wants from companies trying to invent different varieties of the airship. His company is drilling in Nunavut at the silver and zinc-rich Hackett River base metal property.

Theoretically, companies could use their airships to airlift several heavy equipment trucks at a time, or a crucial piece of equipment for processing precious metals, to a Nunavut mine at any time of the year.

Barry Prentice, a professor and director of the Transport Institute at the University of Manitoba said mining infrastructure projects such as the Bathurst Inlet Road and Port Project in the Kitikmeot region would become obsolete.

A mining executive for a gold mine project near Baker Lake said his company would consider using airships to cut costs in the future.

But the airship industry still has to finish their research and set prices for their product, said Brad Thiele, vice-president of Meadowbank projects for Cumberland Resources.

Thiele said mining companies would consider using tested airships, to avoid the expense of shipping cargo by truck, train, then ship, and finally all-terrain vehicles.

“There’s all kinds of reasons there’s nothing happening in Nunavut,” Thiele said, “And that’s one of the biggest reasons, is the cost of transportation and logistics. We’re fighting with that full-time… trying to get this gold mine off the ground.”

And, helium-filled airships float better in cold weather.

The companies designing the airships have spent millions of dollars creating prototypes over the past two decades, trying to see if they can take on heavy loads. One Canadian company will test their spherical model in Manitoba this year with two tonnes of cargo, while an American company is already claiming they will be able to handle 500 tonnes.

Prentice said these are not fly-by-night, start-up companies, but well-researched entrepreneurs. One company is said to have teamed up with Lockheed Martin, the U.S. defence giant.

Airships are generating more interest now, as new technology makes them tougher and safer. The world was traumatized by the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, where a Zeppelin crashed in New Jersey, killing 36 passengers. But airships today use helium instead of hydrogen, a highly flammable gas, and are built with tough “space-age” fibres, like spectra, which are up to 10 times stronger than steel of equivalent weight.

Many companies claim their airships will land on ice, snow, water, or tundra. Unlike planes, they don’t need a landing strip.

Designers in Canada and the U.S. say these features will allow airships to deliver heavy loads to remote corners of the Arctic in the middle of winter.

Hokan Colting, CEO of 21st Century Airships, one of at least six companies trying to make the airship commercially viable, said he hopes to test one of his prototypes in Nunavut in the coming years.

In the meantime, he plans to get feedback from northern residents about what they’d like to see from airship transportation.

“I don’t think that the airship is going to replace all other means of transporting goods and people,” Colting said from his office in Newmarket, Ont.

“It’s just going to fill in the holes of what can’t be done today.”