Transport committee  No, but typically if a railway is built or you have a highway, then your transportation costs are minimal. Where it starts to make more sense is when you look at regions that don't have that infrastructure. So if you have to factor in the cost of $4 billion to install a railway so you can access a mine, for example, it's starts to become a different equation.

Transport committee  Lockheed Martin has a competing product, and Lockheed Martin bid against Northrop Grumman for the U.S. military's long-endurance, multi-intelligence vehicle program. It's a U.S. Army program. Northrop Grumman won that competition, but the manufacturer of the air vehicle is Hybrid Air Vehicles from the United Kingdom, and the first flight of that fully assembled vehicle could happen this month.

Transport committee  No, they're not operating. When this surveillance version for the U.S. Army flies, it will be the first flight of this model.

Transport committee  There will be a requirement for infrastructure for sure, just like you need airports to operate airplanes. At some point, you will need to put these vehicles in some facility for annual maintenance. The intention is for these things to operate in the field without the requirement for massive infrastructure, but there will have to be certain locations across your regions where you can bring the air vehicles back for maintenance, routine maintenance, inspections, that type of stuff.

Transport committee  It can land either vertically or like a conventional aircraft, and it requires about three to four times its length. If it's 100 metres long, it's going to need about 1000 feet to get airborne, fully loaded. The beauty of it is that you don't need a runway. You could literally land this thing on a lake, spin it around, back up against a shoreline, and unload equipment.