It's a very good question. It's one that I've asked them as well: what is holding you back? It varies with the various companies. Lockheed Martin, which you see on the board, the biggest company by far, is a purely military contractor. It will not do anything civilian. It made that a policy when it almost lost the company with the L-1011 airliner. So it has been a defence contractor only; that's all it will do.
On the other ones, you can go down the list. Some are relatively smaller. Every one of the companies up there has basically suffered from a lack of investment in this technology. It's that lack of business confidence. Again, to bring an airship to Canada and fly it and do a demonstration, Lockheed Martin certainly could afford to if it wanted to, but I'm not so sure the rest of them are in a position to do that.
Beyond that, there are no hangars here. If you have a problem with the airship, where do you go? How do you maintain it? The closest hangar would be in Ohio, and that's owned by Lockheed Martin, and it may not let you in if you're not them. North Carolina has a hangar. There are a couple in California. So it would be very difficult to do that if you ran into trouble.
The second point, of course, is who is going to pay you for your goods? Again, if you are operating a mine for some operation and you have to meet a deadline because you have investors who are depending on you to come up with revenues, you say you will. Are you going to take a chance on a technology that you haven't seen work before? Or are you going to wait for somebody else to make it work and then you'll invest in it? I think it's the latter.
We've talked to companies like Hudbay Minerals. I had a wonderful conversation with the president, and he said he'd hire them right away if they were available, but he wouldn't invest anything in seeing them become available because that's not what they do. They don't take that risk. So all the risk is on the companies to prove themselves.
For that matter, in order to do business in Canada, you have to have a certified airship with pilots operating in Canada. Those are rules we have under the cabotage restrictions that apply to air, truck, and all the rest of our modes of transport. Where would we get the pilots? We have no airship pilots in this country. Maybe we've got three guys who could fly them because they've got hot air balloon pilot licences, but I don't think Lockheed would let them on their airship, not without extensive training. How would you get the airship certified in Canada?