How airships could solve one of Canada’s major transportation challenges

By Kat Tancock ~ www.begiant.ca

What it is
A transportation network that uses airships – huge inflatables with engines and attached cargo bays – to move goods cheaply and without emissions, aimed at serving remote communities and industry sites that roads can’t or don’t reach.

Who’s behind it
Winnipeg-based Buoyant Aircraft Systems International (BASI), founded in 2011 by pilot and industrial designer Dale George and Barry Prentice, a University of Manitoba professor who specializes in transportation economics. Prentice wrote his master’s thesis on the idea of using airships to bring food from the tropics to Canada.

What problem is it trying to solve?
Many remote communities, primarily in Canada’s North, receive goods in two ways: by airplane, which is expensive and emissions-intensive; and on winter ice roads, which are temporary and face increasingly shorter seasons because of climate change. Prentice remembers ice roads that lasted four to six weeks in the past; now, he says, four weeks “would be a very good year.”

These limited transportation options mean high costs and long delays – issues that contribute to problems such as food insecurity and housing shortages. It takes at least two years to build a house in a remote community, Prentice says, because shipments are always incomplete. “Something’s always missing. There’s no such thing as a one-year house.”

Industries such as mining face similar problems in remote areas. Building roads is expensive and time-consuming and has negative effects on wildlife, like breaking up habitat corridors, while fossil fuel-powered aircraft come with high costs and limitations in scale. In addition, decarbonizing transportation is essential to meeting national and global targets in the fight against climate change.

Read original full article by Kat Tancock:
https://www.begiant.ca/stories/ideas/winnipeg-basi-airships-transportation-canadian-north/