BY CDR. NORM NORMAND & BARRY PRENTICE

Editor’s note: The following article was adapted from a white paper written by Commander Norm Normand during his time at the Canadian Forces College.

The Arctic is fundamental to Canada’s national identity and Arctic sovereignty is a key part of Canada’s history and future. Canada’s Arctic region encompasses over 40% of total land mass and 75% of its national coastline. Canada also holds a privileged place by being one of only five nations granted governance, management and jurisdiction of the Arctic Ocean.

There has been growing international interest in the Arctic due to resource development, climate change, control of the Northwest Passage and access to transportation routes. Adversaries like Russia are growing their Arctic presence with the build-up of military forces with new bases, new weapons systems, and also using the High North as a testbed for advanced weapons including hypersonic missiles. Not only is Russia a concern, but China has also set its sights on the Arctic after declaring itself a “near-Arctic state” and publicly stated its intent to establish a polar silk-road.

How the Arctic region evolves will have major implications for Canada and its role as an Arctic power. So, the question that needs to be asked is, what can Canada do to ensure its Arctic Sovereignty? A quote by former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper comes to mind: “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it.” If Canada wants to ensure its Arctic sovereignty, it must create and maintain a greater presence in the Far North. This, however, poses some problems from a transportation point of view.

Canada’s geography represents a significant challenge when it comes to transportation. Presently, 30% of Canada’s landmass is accessible via low-cost conventional modes of transportation. The remaining 70% is expensive and difficult to access because of the large geographical distances involved and extremely harsh prevailing climatic conditions. This 70% has been characterized as “an impoverished frontier that depends on seasonal ice roads for inland transport and annual sea lifts for communities on the coasts.”

While ships and aircraft currently provide the bulk of access to the Far North, they are limited by weather, time of year and sparse infrastructure. That is where the concept of using Airships comes in to play.

Cargo airships have a role to play in the commercial development and security of the changing Arctic environment. Airships can serve a military role in surveillance and resupply, while creating access to inland resources without the cost and environmental impact of roads. Airships can also address the chronic economic disparities observed in remote Northern communities. Food insecurity, over-crowded housing and lack of employment opportunities can all be linked to the high cost and limited seasonal availability of transportation. The markets in the North are thin and the distances are vast. A combined military-commercial transportation service is the only economic means of over-coming the high cost of sustaining the North.

A sustainment circuit of airships in the Arctic could be used to support a combination of commercial and military activities – including shipping, search and rescue, and surveillance functions. This circuit would connect to existing transportation nodes and lines of communication. The Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) usage of the circuit would likely be intermittent, meaning the circuit would have the capacity to augment existing cargo delivery to the inhabitants of the region and could also be used to exert Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.

AIRSHIPS, DIRIGIBLES, ZEPPELINS & BLIMPS

What is an airship? Airships, also referred to as dirigibles, is any lighter-than-air aircraft that is powered and steerable, as opposed to free floating like a balloon. Airships generate lift as a result of the lighter-than-air gas that fills the envelope. It is important to note that not all lifting gasses are created equal. There are two primary lifting gasses used in lighter-than-air aircraft: helium and hydrogen – hydrogen being the more efficient lifting gas. That said, there is a hesitancy to use hydrogen as a lifting gas due to its flammability.

Of course, when the term “airship” or “blimp” is mentioned, most of us will think of the Hindenburg disaster – an airship accident that occurred on May 6, 1937, in Manchester Township, New Jersey. Although it was later revealed that the material used to coat the “skin” of the airship, and not hydrogen, was the cause of the disaster, the Hindenburg incident contributed to the aversion regarding the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas and as a fuel. While the Hindenburg disaster lives on in our social consciousness, the evolution of airships has come a long way since 1930’s, with significant advancements in both materials and engineering.

While the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas is banned, DND already has an exemption from the transportation of dangerous goods act. This means that it could technically be possible to trial hydrogen for use as a lifting gas under a DND exemption. Hydrogen is the ideal fuel choice for airships in the Arctic. It is a zero-emission fuel and has been used in commercial fuel cell vehicles, like buses, for many years.

Airships include rigid airships (like the Hindenburg), semi-rigid airships (like the Zeppelin NT), and blimps (like the Goodyear blimp).

Using airships in remote and inhospitable regions, especially in areas with large variations in temperature and humidity, will eliminate blimps from contention as a viable solution. This is because non-rigid airships (blimps) are pressurized, thus subjecting them to climatic vulnerability.

If the CAF is to use airships, it is important to note that rigid-hulled airships would be the best option as they provide a form of lighting protection because their frames act as Faraday cages. This would be a very important consideration if an airship is to be used to transport cargo that responds negatively to lightning (such as ammunition and explosives); because they do not have rigid metal frames, blimps do not possess this added safety feature.

EXISTING TRANSPORTATION CORRIDORS

Airships could be used in Canada to link the North to the existing transportation infrastructure corridors. The map of Canada presents the established air, road, rail and marine infrastructure serving gateways at Tuktoyaktuk, Hay River, Churchill, Moosonee, Goose Bay, Labrador City, Iqaluit, and Nanisivik.

The blue oval that spans Hay River and Tuktoyaktuk represents the Mackenzie River corridor. This corridor connects settlements on Great Slave Lake (such as Yellowknife and Hay River) to Tuktoyaktuk and other communities in the western Canadian Arctic. During the 2020 season, the Mackenzie River was only open from July 10^th to September 19^th. The Mackenzie River is of particular interest because it functions much like a sea corridor, but its route is overland.

The annual sealift to the eastern Canadian Arctic is staged out of Montreal. In recent years these ships have also been serving the Hudson Bay communities north of Churchill. Their operating season, from July to October, is similar to the Mackenzie corridor.

The highway route to Yellowknife is now year-round since the completion of the Deh Cho Bridge in 2012. A permanent gravel road has replaced the winter road between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk, since 2017. The Arctic Ocean can be reached by the Dempster Highway during most of the year. This route is subject to closure during freeze up and break up of the Mackenzie and Peel Rivers.

The central Arctic is served by the trade corridor through Churchill, Manitoba. It has a seaport, a paved airport runway, and rail access (Hudson Bay Railway), but lacks road access.

Hudson Bay could also be served through Moosonee which is connected by the Ontario Northland Railway to southern Ontario. While the idea of building a container port on James Bay at Moosonee has been mentioned, no serious proposals have been discussed. The airport has a paved landing strip and could provide rail-air service to northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec. This part of Quebec is also served by the Route de la Baie James and the Trans-Taiga Road that branches off to the east. However, these are not considered corridors to the Arctic.

Finally, the Arctic can be served by the most northerly rail link in Quebec that terminates at Schefferville, or a road connection to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador.

It is undeniable that the CAF face high costs to maintain a security presence in the Arctic. A sustainable solution must consider the constraints associated with operating in such an extreme environment, and the expense of bringing supplies and fuel in long distances from the South. Assets must have minimal infrastructure footprints and maximize the use of the aforementioned lines of communication (LOCs). These requirements fit the characteristics of a new generation of cargo airships that are flexible, zero-carbon emitters, able to carry large/bulky loads, with minimal infrastructure needs and have low operating costs.

Airships in the Arctic could operate on a “hub and spoke” arrangement where a force may be deployed into a theatre of operations and established along the strategic lines of communications with specific “spokes” getting activated for specific support. This would see the use of existing corridors and gateways to establish a circuit that could be traversed by airships as indicated by the red line on the map of Canada.

AIRSHIP SUSTAINMENT CIRCUIT

The green stars indicate sites that have existing access to ground corridors. These sites could function as gateways for transshipment from ground to airship. The impetus for maximizing ground corridors is year-round service and lower cost. An airship transiting a circuit could either be on a regular or ad hoc “freight run” depending on shifts in demand and/or weather conditions.

The blue stars indicate sites that could be used as nodes that are only accessible by sea or air. The Nanisivik Fuel Facility is a key location in the Canadian Arctic used by both the Royal Canadian Navy and the Canadian Coast Guard. Although sparsely crewed, it needs consumable items for maintenance and repair. An airstrip is nearby, but Nanisivik is cut off from sea shipments for much of the year.

The other blue star is at Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital. It could be used to receive both sealift and CC-177-sized air shipments for onward movement into the Arctic region. Iqaluit has an international airport (linkages to Greenland) which can accommodate a CC-177 Globemaster. Iqaluit also has a new deep seaport that opened in July, 2023.

CONCEPT OF EMPLOYMENT

Military requirements on cargo airship services would most likely be a combination of regular resupply and surges in demand. Military exercises and operations in the region take place over a finite period and follow a pattern: deployment, sustainment, draw-down. The CAF’s signature northern operation, consisting of a series of Arctic activities and exercises called Operation NANOOK, is an example of the CAF conducting activities in the Arctic that happen predictably in time but not space. Airships used to conduct sustainment in the Arctic would require the ability to deviate from a set location for the sake of weather or to respond to an emergency.

While the CAF could own some airships to conduct surveillance missions, for example, it would not be economic to have a large airship fleet on standby to provide this surplus capacity. That is why a private/public solution would make the most sense. A private airship fleet serving the mining industry could also operate on a standby basis to provide lift capabilities for emergency or military purposes.

An airship concept that could be used in a sustainment capacity for mining/military operations was proposed at the 2020 Annual Canadian Transportation Research Forum. The proposed concept was for an airship, such as the Buoyant Aircraft Systems International (BASI) 30-ton lift airship, to operate primarily by transiting between a combined hangar/warehouse where cargo would be shipped from industry to the mining operation/remote community/military exercise. At the furthest forward point in the supply chain that the airship would need to travel, the proposal calls for the installation of airship-transportable fixed bases called Buoyant Aircraft Rotating Terminals (BARTs).

HOW TO LAND AN AIRSHIP

An airship is guided to a system like the “bear trap” which is used on RCN vessels for helicopter landings. A rotating pad is fixed in place while the forklift transits from the ground. Subsequently, the airship can turn to remain pointed into the wind. This reduces stress on the airframe associated with maintaining an orientation against the wind and ensures the safety of the ground crew. If the airship turns in the wind, the ground crew on the BART move with it.

As part of the proposed Airship Sustainment Circuit, DND would require seven BARTs, (one at each of the proposed nodes) plus two or three that could be packed up and transported via airship to the specific location in the region that the military is seeking to operate. Of course, all the remote communities and the mining operations would be responsible to provide their own BARTs.

AIRSHIP SPECS

The proposed BASI 30-ton lift airship has a cruising speed of 150km/h. This means that over 12 hours, the airship could intentionally deviate from its regular circuit by up to 1,800km to provide support in a location in the Arctic that is not along the regular flight path. This significantly increases flexibility regarding re-taskings for higher priority operations such as support to search and rescue. If the airship is used to deliver cargo for that higher priority mission, the location of the cargo delivery would need to already be outfitted with an apparatus such as a BART to recover the airship and effect the delivery, or else the first delivery will need to be a portable BART.

To demonstrate the range of airships as a function of time, an arc with a radius of 1,800 km has been superimposed over the potential Hay River node to demonstrate how over a 12-hour period, one airship could cover a substantial portion of the Arctic to support an Arctic operation. After a 24-hour period, any point in the entire Canadian Arctic region becomes accessible.

Furthermore, a second airship could be added to the Moosonee transshipment point and a third airship stationed at Iqaluit. The range of the Iqaluit airship is in black to differentiate it from the airships that have access to ground corridors because the cargo transported by an airship based in Iqaluit would be limited to what can be transported via air/sea. The coverage range of these airships is shown on the map of Canada.

If cargo was continuously being pushed to warehouses in the nodes along the circuit, even one airship transiting a “freight run” circuit would be able to deliver cargo to anywhere within the Arctic region within a day. With two or three airships in the circuit, the region becomes much more accessible, enabling sustainment within 12 hours of a node.

A traditional limitation of airpower is persistence – time spent in the air versus on the ground. Conventional aircraft must spend a greater percentage of their time on the ground than in the air. While still subject to severe weather, and even though they need to be maintained and refueled, airships spend much more time in the air than conventional aircraft. It is this persistence in the air domain that presents a real opportunity for cargo movements. With airships, cargo can effectively “loiter” in the area and can be deployed anywhere in the region within a day.

SURVEILLANCE APPLICATIONS

The recent report by the Auditor General (AG) in 2022 recognizes the need to have a surveillance presence in the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The number of marine voyages in these waters during the past decade are approximately three times more than in the 1990s, and the trend is increasing.

In Canada, the responsibility for surveillance is spread between four government departments, including the military. The primary finding of the AG report is that long-standing gaps affecting the surveillance of Canada’s Arctic waters and sharing of information have not been addressed. Moreover, the renewal of vessels (icebreaker and patrol ships), aircraft, satellites, and infrastructure has fallen behind and will not be replaced in time to meet future need.

The AG report is most critical of the satellite surveillance and the lag time required to obtain sufficient surface ships and icebreakers. According to the report, current Canadian satellite-based surveillance capabilities do not meet the needs of National Defence and other federal organizations for earth-observation data.

Either as a substitute, or an addition to existing capabilities, airships could play and effective and economic role in Arctic surveillance. Airships in a surveillance mode would operate differently than in the cargo mode. Instead of a large cargo hold, the airship could be fitted with much larger fuel tanks. Also, a variety of optical and electronic surveillance equipment would be added. To perform the surveillance mission most effectively, the airships would ideally fly above the clouds, at say 15,000 feet. An airship that carries 30 tons at 5,000 feet would maybe carry only 15 tons at the higher elevation, but this should still provide adequate fuel to enable missions of two weeks or more.

The weight of a higher altitude airship could also be reduced by shifting to a Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS). This would eliminate the weight of the crew and their accommodations, and the need to build in pressurization and heating for the occupied spaces.

A system such as this would be less expensive than adding icebreakers and more effective. An airship could look for unauthorized aircraft (crewed or uncrewed) as well as incoming missiles (hypersonic or conventional), while looking down for ships and submarines amongst the Arctic Islands.

A WALRUS & A FLYING WHALE

The U.S. has already started researching options for an airship design. Specifically, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) “Walrus” program is looking at an airship solution that “would carry more than 10 times the average payload as a CC-177 but would travel at only one-fourth the speed.” In looking at options to address gaps between the airlift and sealift requirements, DARPA’s Walrus program proposes the use of an airship with a 500-ton payload that “could operate from unimproved locations and transport its load anywhere in the world in a few days. Estimates of achievable speeds for airships range from about 80 knots to 120 knots.

An airship solution to the cargo delivery problem in Canada’s Arctic is not a particularly new concept. Paris-based airship company called Flying Whales has signed an exclusive deal with Canada that could advance plans to use the dirigibles as an Arctic-preserving cargo solution. Flying Whales’ proposed airships are 200 metres long with a rigid envelope and has a projected lifting capacity of 60 tonnes, three times the maximum carrying capacity of a Hercules plane. Flying Whales is planning on completing its first prototype by 2025 followed by two years of ground and flight testing before commercial production could be approved. This pushes commercial production forecasts out to 2027 for Flying Whales. Worth noting: It was announced in 2022 that Quebec is investing $55M in the Flying Whales’ cargo airship project.

THE FUTURE OF AIRSHIPS

What has worked in the past to connect the Arctic with the rest of the world is rapidly becoming untenable. The speed, payload, and range of many conceptual airships could already add value to this problem set. For the purposes of proof of concept, a commercial “off the shelf” design could be used to demonstrate the utility of airships in the arctic or at least yield valuable lessons learned from which a bespoke tenable Canadian solution emerges. We’ve identified numerous platforms that could be used to develop this proof of concept. DARPA’s “Walrus”; Flying Whale’s cargo airships; Buoyant Aircraft Systems International’s Buoyant Aircraft Rotating Terminals all present novel solutions to the problem of cargo delivery to the Arctic.

As an industry, airships used to transport cargo is still in an embryonic phase. There are numerous innovative solutions within industry that could be applied to the problem of a tenuously connected Arctic region. That region has numerous stakeholders outside of the CAF. Because of the multiplicity of stakeholders, there should be a feasibility review through ADM(Mat). The feasibility review should incorporate the feedback from other government partners so that the CAF solution could also be leveraged by these partners where there exists surplus capacity in the sustainment system.

The concept would be for an airship solution to be configured to perform multiple roles so that other agencies can achieve maximum benefit from shared use where there are overlapping and complimentary interests. Alongside garnering feedback from other governmental partners such as the RCMP, CBSA, and DFO, it is of the utmost importance to socialize a proposed solution with the current inhabitants of the region.

“If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography,” said William Lyon Mackenzie King, former Canadian Prime Minister. Airships represent an environmentally conscientious solution that addresses Canada’s vast geography and the CAF has an incredible opportunity to be a leader in developing and applying this groundbreaking solution.

Norm Normand & Barry Prentice are Guest Contributors