Airships Coming To the Arctic

Yellowknife-based airline to try out helium-filled, hovering blimps to supply the remoter parts of the Arctic.

A Northwest Territories air line has just signed a deal that will bring the first airships (or blimps, or dirigibles) to the Arctic by 2014. Discovery Air, a Yellowknife-based air line owned by the awesomely named Rolf Dawson, will buy the airships from the U.K.'s Hybrid Air Vehicles, or HAV. The U.S. military has also signed on to buy some of the HAV air ships, as the prototype can carry a whopping 50 tonnes of supplies (twice what a Hercules cargo plane can). No terms of the deal are available yet, but the new fleet could lead to cheaper shipping of supplies to remote areas in the Arctic, where food costs are often double or even more than what we pay down south. Sadly, this also means that there's now some serious competition for Barry Prentice, the University of Manitoba professor who's been developing his own Arctic airship with the hope of revolutionizing transportation in the North.