Yes. We found that it depends on the size of the airship. The bigger they get, the better they are, of course, because you have less fixed cost relative to what you're moving. An airship with 30 tonnes of lift—and the ones that are being planned are between 20 and 50 tonnes of lift.... A 50-tonne lift would be cheaper than the ice roads. That's less expensive than just the trucks on the ice roads, not the building and maintenance of the ice roads.
The other aspect that is sometimes ignored is the year-round cost. If you are bringing supplies in and you have to store them for 11 months, then you have a large inventory cost, and of course things can get damaged.
As well, there's the problem of things not arriving and the house is delayed for a full year. Certainly in some cases we see that goods arrive on an ice road, but they get dropped off in the snow because there's no place to put them. Kitchen cupboards, windows, products that are somewhat perishable, get damaged before they ever get put into a house. Of course even when we go to build houses, we're importing the tradespeople from the south. With a few houses being built in a short period, it's hard to train people to be electricians and plumbers in these communities.
What the airship would change—and this is why it is a game-changer—is that it would allow year-round service. In addition to bringing in materials year-round for building houses and other activities, it could bring in food products and other things with it.
I think your point is whether the airships are too big. Would they be visiting once a month and bringing in supplies? I don't think so. I think you would have a sort of milk run. Many of these communities are located together in Manitoba: St. Theresa Point, Garden Hill, and Wasagamack are all around the same lake. There are 15,000 people living there, so you could have trips coming in every other day with an airship.
The cost would be much less expensive than airplanes. Airplanes are horribly expensive, especially small ones. Because of the runways, the limits are for fewer than seven tonnes of lift for an airplane, and that would be a big one.