|
|
The Globe and Mail, February 6, 2003
Blimp Takes Telecom to New Heights
By Elizabeth Shearer
It is the dawn of the age of the blimp. At least, innovator Hokan Colting thinks so. He has developed an airship that has the potential to revolutionize the telecommunications industry, as well as the practice of military surveillance.
The founder and chief executive officer of 21st Century Airships Inc., based in Newmarket, Ont. has created a spherical airship that can act as a high-altitude antenna for wireless networks and secure intelligence-gathering platform. The ships outperform traditional cigar-shaped blimps, which barely reach 5,000 feet in altitude. Mr. Colting's airships have flown to 18,000 feet, and two trials are scheduled this year to fly to 25,000 and 40,000 feet. By the end of next year he intends to reach the all-important goal of 75,000 feet - well above airplane altitudes.
This may be significant both to the wireless industry and to U.S. president George W. Bush's Homeland Security initiative - which includes a $100 million (U.S.) contract for the development of a prototype high-altitude airship for surveillance operations.
"You have to go up to 60,000 to 75,000 feet for any of these applications," Mr. Colting says. "That is where you have the best atmosphere. There is the lowest wind, you're above the weather, and you're above all air traffic. Air traffic control stops at 60,000 feet. There is nothing above."
The concept of high-platform transmission for telecommunications and surveillance applications has been around since the fifties. But no company yet has been able to create a vehicle that can stay in one place in the stratosphere while carrying a payload of tons of technological equipment.
The two technologies currently in in use - satellites and antenna based terrestrial networks - are expensive and have limitations. Satellites cover huge areas but cost millions of dollars to put into orbit, and their payload of technological equipment is not recoverable once launched. The tremendous distance between satellite and Earth often results in delayed communication. The typical life span of a satellite is four to 10 years.
Terrestrial networks are based on cell towers and rooftop-building antennas. As anyone who owns a cell phone knows, the signal is sensitive to the terrain and is easily interrupted. Another drawback is that there is limit to the number of users that can be simultaneously be supported from the same sector on a cell tower, creating the need for more and more antennas.
High altitude airships will change all that by combining the best of two infrastructures, Mr. Colting says. Like satellites, they have a wide coverage area, yet they're closer to the ground, so there's essentially no delay in communication. They're also close enough to the ground to provide all existing types of terrestrial services, yet far enough to overcome terrain obstacles.
"The best thing about the airship over the satellite is that it only takes 3 1/2 hours to transition from sea level to altitude, so I can easily bring these airships down, change or update their payload with the latest technology, and relaunch them," says Keith Vierela, Techsphere Systems International LLC, an airship company that recently signed a "multimillion-dollar" deal with 21st Century. The Atlanta based company has agreed to minimum number of high-altitude airships, and plans to lease space on them to wireless communications providers. A deal reported late last year between Telesphere Communications Inc., a subsidiary of Techsphere and Sanswire technologies Inc., a high-speed wireless Internet provider based in Atlanta, fell through.
However, Mr. Vierela says the deal between 21st Century and Techsphere is definitive and that he's excited about the future of high-altitude commercial and government applications.
"One airship can provide the coverage of several thousand towers and rooftop antenna forms," Mr. Vierela says. "The first high-altitude [airship] to go to 75,000 feet is targeted for 2004. We're not talking years away, we're talking months away."
In the wake of the Columbia space shuttle crash, Mr. Colting says he has had many inquiries about accelerating the development for his high-altitude airships. Much of the payload carried by shuttles can also be carried by the airships.
"The phones have been red hot," Mr. Colting says. "And there is a sense of urgency. Some of the shuttle payloads are sensors for the military and there is a continuous need for getting these sensors up there. The other three shuttles are grounded until they find out what happened with Columbia."
Mr. Colting's spherical airship manoeuvres like a helicopter. It has the ability to hover, ascend and descend, and it can turn 360 degrees on its axis. This is in stark contrast with traditional airships, fixed-wing aircraft and require forward momentum and air flow over their control surfaces in order to manoeuvre. It's also a reason, Mr. Colting says, that they don't make ideal vehicles for high-altitude applications.
"Helium expands as you go higher," he explains. "When you get up to altitude, it fills the whole envelope. For my sphere it's fine because it works like an upside-down cup - you always have helium collected in the middle. The cigar shape is long, the helium tends to slosh around, so you may not be able to control it on the way up and down and it may even end nose up."
"I thought it looked fantastic and I decided I was going to own one," he remembers. "I got one just for fun, but everywhere I went, people flocked around and I realized there was a lot of potential for sightseeing and advertising balloons."
Mr. Colting and his nine employees are currently working on his 10th prototype. He says his innovation is generating interest from around the world at a rate of two phone calls a day. Recently he had inquiries from a company in Singapore looking to use airships for telecommunications and air traffic control, and from an African lodge interested in using airships for jungle safaris. (Unlike hot-air balloons, which can only fly at certain times of the day owing to weather, propeller-driven airships can fly around the clock.)
21st Century's low-altitude airships, capable of reaching 25,000 feet, are about 20 metres in diameter and will cost $2-million. The planned high-altitude model will be comparatively huge, measuring 80 metres in diameter, or the height of a 26-storey building. "They have engines propellers," he says. "We have solar cells on the airship that will power the electric motors and propellers during the daytime. And during the night initially we have diesel engines that power generators that in turn power the electric motors and generators."
The test flights, to take place in Arizona, will be manned, with the pilot contained in a cabin inside the sphere. But eventually the ships will be operated by remote control. It is believed that development in solar cell and regenerative fuel-cell technologies will eventually allow the airships to remain in the stratosphere indefinitely.
Mr. Colting is a bidder on the Homeland Security contract, but he's up against giants such as Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman.
"I don't think we have a chance for that contract," he says. "There's so much politics involved. It's not going to necessarily the best concept. It's going to be the one with the best connections. But we have the only technology that is actually going to make it there, and of that I'm convinced."
"I had a direct call from Boeing asking if we were interested in teaming up with them for the contract and I said no. We had an indirect call from Northrop Grumman, too, and they got the same answer. They're They're interested in our technology, but if you team up with a big company like that, you lose your freedom to innovate."
Mr. Colting also intends to use the airships for advertising and sightseeing rides, which is how he started out in the business.
A manufacturer of hot-air balloons in his native Sweden (he founded and later sold Thunder and Colt, which makes about one-third of the worlds hot-air balloons), Mr. Colting moved to Canada in the early 1980s and began making promotional balloons for Re/Max. Always interested in blimps, he sold his balloon business and house to finance 21st Century.
"I developed a new system that was actually going to be for cigar shapes, but as we were working on it, I realized that the spherical shape had many advantages," he says.
Mr. Colting, 58, says he has faced many skeptics. "I asked the so-called experts at that time and they laughed at me," he says. "Life is always a risk," he adds. "We have come up against many challenges, but not any show-stoppers."
And in the process he has earned respect from his peers.
"He's well known in the airship industry all over the world," says Barry Prentice, the director of the Transport Institute at the University of Manitoba. "In terms of developing a technology like this, Hokan Colting was thinking about this, and involved with this, and actually doing this for a number of years, so he's way ahead of everybody else. I have talked with some of the people at the U.S. military and they actually like the design, so it's not like his airships are being dismissed out of hand.
|
