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Winnipeg Free Press, August 4, 2004
Blimp comeback pushed in Manitoba, at Pentagon
Airship demonstration slated for province next June
By Bruce Garvey
OTTAWA -- The Goodyear blimp -- famous for its spectacular Super Bowl aerial shots, and not much else -- could be the key to opening up the wealth of Canada's Far North and safeguarding our sovereignty of the Arctic. And while industry isn't yet ready to jump aboard the airship-revival bandwagon, the Pentagon is deeply involved in a futuristic study that envisages a fleet of giant blimps providing the U.S. military with airlift capability around the world. American generals will be on hand in Winnipeg next June for the Northern Resupply Airship Demonstration, when organizers are planning to demonstrate an airship cargo flight to a remote First Nations community in Manitoba.
If it's given the go-ahead by Transport Canada, a cargo craft built by 21st Century Airships in Newmarket, Ont., will point the way to what Barry Prentice of the University of Manitoba sees as a leadership role for Canada in the airship revival.
"It's an idea whose time has come and the potential right around the world is enormous," says Prentice, director of the I.H. Asper School of Business Transport Institute. "It could resolve the whole issue of our Arctic sovereignty with unlimited access to the North. If we're not up there, how can we lay claim to it?"
He looks ahead to a day when a fleet of environmentally clean cargo airships are opening up the North, ferrying in staff and tonnes of supplies to forestry, mining and pipeline companies at a fraction of the cost of current land and air links.
Quietly cheering on Prentice's vision is retired American vice-admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who heads the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation (OFT) and is campaigning for the creation of a civilian fleet of American airships that could be appropriated by the military in an emergency.
"The U.S. requires greater mobility to meet burgeoning military and commercial demands," says the OFT's Lt.-Col. Michael Woodgerd, "and the U.S. aerospace industry shows signs of faltering and losing its pre-eminent position in the world. Airships offer the only truly viable new method of moving the volume and weights of cargo in the remote regions of the world."
Entitled The Mobilus Initiative, the Woodgerd plan relies on the civilian fleet concept since the American military simply cannot afford to build the airship flotilla. "We are at war, and cannot sacrifice current capabilities for potential future ones," he says.
And he points to the huge civilian potential for a blimp fleet in Canada: "Governments have concerns about national mobility separate from purely military ones. National sovereignty and access to an entire nation's area also factor into the equation in Canada. Seventy per cent of Canada is not accessible by road. The cost of supplying remote settlements of the First Nations peoples is high, existing aircraft are nearing the end of their useful lives and replacement aircraft have higher operating costs."
Adds Prentice: "We're acting as a catalyst here and trying to think outside the box and the conclusion is that airships are the perfect solution for our North and its development. Climate is changing and the Northwest Passage will soon be navigable. How would we cope with an oil spill up there? Right now, we couldn't. But with airships we could."
Pioneered by Germany, which developed its Zeppelin craft as a bombing platform, airships were used as luxurious airborne ocean liners across the Atlantic in the 1930s. But their development came to a fiery and dramatic end when the airship Hindenburg burned in a spectacular blaze at its moorings in New Jersey in 1937.
The tragic accident cast a cloud over the airship's future and it was quickly forgotten in the Second World War race to advance and develop faster fixed-wing aircraft.
"This is a long-term project -- we're looking at a decade at least," says Prentice. "But the potential is there for Canada to become a true world leader. The demand is there -- in Siberia, the Amazon, the Congo, Australia, Indonesia and nowhere more than Canada."
-- CanWest News Service
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