Transport committee  First of all, I should tell you that, by training, I'm a transportation economist. I love trains. I love roads. I love all modes of transport, so I have no particular bias, but each one has its benefits. The merits of trains are for very high volumes and very long distances. For

Transport committee  It's a very valid question. It gets asked on a regular basis, and it should be. It's historical in many ways. It has to do with investment in the technology. Before the Second World War airships and airplanes were neck-and-neck as to which was going to be the main passenger carr

Transport committee  The airships used to cross the Atlantic in 24 to 36 hours, which is very fast for cargo movement. Very little cargo has to move at 500 miles an hour. The railway's average speed, by the way, is about 25 miles an hour. If you can go 80 miles an hour in an airship, that's actually

Transport committee  I'll let Mr. Russell answer that.

Transport committee  Go ahead, Guy.

Transport committee  That's the one case where airships will not be affected. Fog will not affect an airship because you can come in and can sit there and come down vertically. In one of the recent accidents we saw in northwestern Ontario, an airplane came in, he couldn't find the runway, and he end

Transport committee  The major advantage is that you have year-round transport, and you have year-round transport with big bulky things. By pound or by kilo, one of the most expensive things to move to the north is rigid insulation. You can fill a whole truck full of insulation and have half a tonne.

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  Your questions are valid. I would use windmills as a comparison. Windmills were used, obviously, in Holland—the old Dutch windmills—and we used small windmills across the prairies and many places to pump water and generate a little electricity up to about 1950, when we put in an

Transport committee  I guess that's a valid question. Maybe that's what the role of government is. Government does create stability. It creates the framework for business to prosper and go forward. Part of the role of government is to make sure the environment is correct so people will make investmen

Transport committee  No, we haven't created a business plan. I'm an academic. We have a small airship we built for research purposes to look at things, and we'll be going on that. We're sort of testing the system and challenging the way the regulations work with that. But setting up an aircraft busin

Transport committee  I'm very interested in this possibility. There's been some indication to me that they'd like to have a meeting some time in August with the people in Quebec. That's still being worked out. I'm certainly aware of the issue in the development of the north. This is clearly a technol

Transport committee  There are several environmental issues that are important. The first one is that you can use alternative fuels, and they don't burn much fuel to begin with, so they should not emit much carbon. It's quite conceivable to have an airship that would be fueled on hydrogen, because

Transport committee  Thank you very much. I just have one comment on that. The airports do not have any hangars, that I know of. All hangars are owned by the private airline companies, and of course none of those are suitable for airships. The airships can certainly operate at an airport—there's no