Airships to serve the North

Remote communities in the near future may look to the skies for supplies, as talk gets louder of using freight airships to bring goods into places formerly serviced only by winter roads.
The latest call for using freight airships to bring goods into remote communities comes from the Conference Board of Canada, an independent non-profit research organization. Its latest report, Northern Assets: Transportation Infrastructure in Remote Communities, is about the state of transportation infrastructure in northern Canada. The report, released in December, found that winter road seasons are shrinking as climate change continues to warm northern regions. It also notes that while building new railways and roads to remote regions may be beneficial for the communities and the country as a whole, the high cost of constructing and then maintaining those transportation networks makes it hard for governments to commit the necessary funds.
The answer, at least according to a professor at the University of Winnipeg, may be freight airships that can ship goods quickly and easily.
Prof. Barry Prentice said that it is easy to envision airships being in operation as early as 2014.
“The payload would be the same as a tractor trailer, but an airship would be faster, more fuel efficient and able to land practically anywhere, removing the need for expensive road construction and maintenance,” Prentice said.
The first use of freight airships may take place in the Northwest Territories (NWT). Discovery Airlines of Yellowknife has a tentative agreement with Hybrid Air Vehicles to supply a fleet of airships to be used in the North. A prototype is expected to be ready in 2014. It will be used to supply goods to diamond mines and remote communities.
Discovery Air says the airships will be designed to transfer loads onto multiple surfaces, including water, ice, snow and land and able to carry loads of up to 50 tonnes, equivalent to about two tractor-trailer loads.
Similar airships have been designed for the American military as supply and surveillance vessels. The first military airship is expected to be in service by the end of 2011. It is designed to carry a load of over one tonne, fly up to an altitude of 10,000 metres and stay continuously airborne for up to three weeks.
As the Conference Board report noted, decision makers need to look at alternative means of supplying remote communities and industrial development in the North because traditional transportation means are becoming increasingly unstable.
From extremely high construction costs to high maintenance costs, new infrastructure requirements in Canada’s North are complex and expensive, the report stated.
Meanwhile climate change is having an effect on existing infrastructure across the North. Melting permafrost has increasingly made railway lines unstable and both buildings and roads across the North are seeing effects of melting permafrost and shifting weather patterns.
Yet it is the winter road system that faces the biggest threat. The Conference Board report cites a recent study by the University of California showing that milder winters and increased snowfalls across Canada’s North will “severely reduce inland access in ... coming decades, mainly because of the reduced viability of winter roads.”
As an example the study stated that the ice road from Yellowknife north to the diamond mines in the NWT will see annual decreases in the amount of time it is open, due to climate change. By 2020, the report stated, the ice road will be open for 17 per cent less time than it was in 2008.
However, the report is clear that roads and railways and other transportation solutions are essential to northern economic development.
It concludes that governments need to be inventive when considering transportation of goods into remote regions, considering the extreme cost of building and maintaining roads and rail lines in the North that may make possible alternative methods, such as airships, economically viable.