Transport committee  Thank you very much to everyone for having us come. I want to talk a bit about airships, give you some background on the technology and how it's evolving, and give you some comments on why we are where we are today. To begin, I'm going to outline the need for a game changer,

Transport committee  Permit me to answer, if I could. We don't build hangars everywhere. Hangars are like dry docks. You have a few of them located strategically around the country, and one hangar would serve 25 airships or more. Going out to the community, most of the time the airships live in the

Transport committee  Yes, I have. We've done work on that.

Transport committee  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 li

Transport committee  There are no good comparative studies simply because not very much work has been done on this. We will use all means of transport. For example, bringing oil into the communities on the coast I still see being done by ships, because it's very inexpensive to have them do that, and

Transport committee  That is my hope, indeed. Mr. Ginter and I have in fact been talking about this. There is no reason that first nations members cannot be the pilots, the owners, the operators. They are located in the north. They should be the ones who are doing this. They certainly are the operato

Transport committee  Maybe I could add to that on the question of sovereignty. Certainly the ability to move people and materials quickly to any location is one of the great advantages. We look at such things as search and rescue or cleanup of pollution or an oil spill. One of the most difficult issu

Transport committee  Perhaps I'd ask Mr. Russell to speak to that.

Transport committee  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 th

Transport committee  There's a reciprocal relationship with the U.S. FAA, so if the company applies to have its airship certified here and brought here, it can do that at a certain price. It does cost, and it takes time, but it could be done. Then you'd have to have a Canadian owner, because our regu

Transport committee  It's a regulatory gap. It comes back to our not having any experience with this technology in this country. When the Second World War came around, we trained pilots and the U.S. Navy built the airships and protected the coast and the submarines. So they have a lot of experience w

Transport committee  I think the cabotage rules are a different topic, and one that I would like to get rid of completely anyway. I'm in favour of free trade in transportation services. I think we diminish ourselves unreasonably without good reason, but that's a debate you'll have to take up with the

Transport committee  No question, because it would remove some of those regulatory barriers we have today to do that, and that would be part of it, yes.

Transport committee  I'd be very happy to do that.

Transport committee  That's right. Under the Canadian aviation regulations, or the CARs, as they're referred to, there is no such thing as an airship pilot's licence. What you have is a rating on a hot air balloon licence. A hot air balloon, as we know, has no engines, and an airship has no gas burne