Airships Time Has Come

While nuclear power generation of steam processing for the Tar Sands is in the news off and on again, one of the other wonderful wacky ideas the Lougheed government in Alberta considered in the late 1970's and early 1980's was the use of Airships for heavy lift operations in the Tar sands.

The plans included airships with extra lift for carrying HD equipment, the extra lift provided by attached helicopters.

It turns out to be not so wacky and idea. Airships are an excellent energy efficient and sustainable form of transportation. The dangers posed in the past have been overcome.

But the Hindenberg incident doomed them to the pages of science fiction, from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to Michael Moorcock, for the last sixty years.

The Hindenburg Revisited

Everyone knows that the Hindenburg burned and crashed because it was full of hydrogen. According to Addison Bain, everyone is wrong.

But no longer a report on sustainable transportation in the arctic published last year suggests that Airships need to be seriously considered for Northern development. Furhermore airship development for the north is being taken seriously as a form of sustainable energy efficient transportation see the links below to conferences and studies.

A Zepplin first transversed the Arctic in 1931 in a successful mission. Italy and and Russia also experimented with ariships in the Arctic prior to WWII.

The 1931 Polar Flight of the Airship Graf Zeppelin

An Historical Perspective

With todays technology and designs lighter than air aircraft need to be considered for doing the heavy lifting that other petroleum based forms of transportation can't because of costs.

The International Pipeline and Offshore Contractors Association (IPLOCA) is giving serious consideration to this idea that was once bounced around the Lougheed cabinet. Ah those were the days when the Alberta Advantage was our imagination and enthusiasm for the future.



Examines the political, commercial and personal stories that lie behind airship flights within the Arctic Circle. This book goes far beyond a description of the flights themselves, however fascinating and adventuresome they may have been in their own right. From the first lighter-than-air ascent in the Arctic in 1799 to the flight of the 'Graf Zeppelin' in 1931, it examines some of the early plans and endeavours. 10 maps. Diagrams. 177 b/w illustrations/photos. 312 pages. Hardback

Big balloons prescribed as cheap cure for what ails Nunavut

It’s all up in the air

Prof pitches scheme to test airships in Arctic

Airship industry seeks wider acceptance

21st Century Airships - The future of flight

Airships to the Arctic

University of Manitoba 2003 Airships to the Arctic Symposium II

Airships to the Arctic III

The Mobilus Initiative: Creating A New Component of the US Aerospace Industry Centered Upon Transport Airships

Cargo Airships: Applications in Manitoba and the Arctic

A CASE FOR AIRSHIPS IN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC
Exploration, movement of heavy
bulky equipment, basic research, environmental
and resource management, and sovereignty
issues require transportation that
is cost effective (reduces the high cost of
caching fuel), can move slowly over the
landscape (oceanographic measurements,
geological and geophysical surveys, global
change surveys and wildlife census), has
minimal environmental impact, is highly
visible, and uses a vehicle that can move
easily over rough ice, water and land.
Given the scenarios outlined above it
is clear that other transportation options
need to be considered. One of these is the use
of airships. There are many skeptics concerning
use of airships but most people
agree that airships are light on infrastructure
(the airships are the infrastructure),
require little maintenance, and use comparatively
little fuel. Some of the uneasiness
with airships comes from the perception
that they are unsafe, primarily based on the
image of the burning Hindenburg and the
use of hydrogen.
This article presents a historical perspective
on arctic exploration using airships,
some past and current technologies relating
to airships, and a brief review of comparative
cost of operations. We also discuss the
potential benefits of airships to environmental
research and natural resource management
in the Arctic, and evaluate northern
weather patterns as they relate to airship
operations, as this is a consistent concern of
those who question their use under the
“harsh” arctic conditions.



The Mackenzie Valley Highway: Should it be Completed? If so, How Should It Be Funded

The first part of this paper will examine whether the Mackenzie Valley Highway project
is economically justified. Estimates of construction and annual maintenance costs are available.
In assessing the benefits from quicker and cheaper transport, account will be taken of an
alternative highway route, the Dempster Highway. Consideration will also be given to anemerging technology, airships, which in the near-to-medium future may become a viable alternative for the transport of consumer goods and commercial freight to Northern communities and development sites.

Full Proposals for IPY 2007-2008 Activities
Click for printer friendly version Proposed IPY Activity Details

1.0 PROPOSER INFORMATION

(Activity ID No: 324)

1.1 Title of Activity
The use of airships to study aquatic (marine and freshwater) and terrestrial ecosystems, visually and through the collection of samples across large sections of the Arctic

The key objectives are to test 1) airships as an alternate scientific vehicle, with a low environmental impact, by developing a series of ecological transects across the Canadian Arctic, 2) airships as a mobile transport infrastructure for short term flights such as caching scientific supplies, dropping off and picking up research crews in isolated areas, accessing hunting areas and testing scientific equipment (geophysical and oceanography). Furthermore greenhouse emissions will be documented and data will be collected on weather and air/water/soil/tree samples collected along the transects. Airships will also be used at sea ice break-up and during the spring hunt in the vicinity of Iqaluit. Of particular interest will be an assessment of the impacts, if any, on the movement of mammals and birds and the ability to improve census methods and 3) determine if airships could have a role in mitigating some of the effects of a warming Arctic.
The airship will originate from Yellowknife and key activity areas will be around Inuvik and Iqaluit. The Inuvik Research Centre and Nunavut Research Institute (Iqaluit) are major research partners in the proposal. ETAA plans several ecological transects from Yellowknife to Inuvik, Yellowknife to Iqaluit via Rankin Inlet. A transect is planned along the north slope of Alaska to Barrow and back across the Beaufort Sea in conjunction with the Canadian coast guard vessel (Nahidik). Additional activities will occur in the vicinity of Inuvik (transects over the Mackenzie River delta) and Iqaluit (test equipment, move supplies and move hunters during the spring hunt at the ice edge). The period of operation will be about 6 months over 2 years with most activity during the summer months. Arctic weather has often been considered a limitation for airship operation in the Arctic. A recent evaluation of weather patterns in the Canadian Arctic indicates that airships could operate much of the year in the Canadian Arctic because weather does not appear to be limiting.

The Transportation Context
Airships could form an integral part of sustainable passenger and freight transport.
The majority of new concepts for medium and large airships rely on rigid structures for
providing a maximum payload capacity, safety and efficiency. Airships cruise at a low
altitude (1000 - 2000m) which helps avoid interference with other modes. They require
little ground infrastructure and could link to other transport modes.
“Air crane” concept
The Dutch CargoLifter AG “CL160” is an example of a large semi-rigid freight
airship for point-to-point delivery of heavy and bulky loads – “air crane” concept. With
a payload capacity of 160 tons and a range of 10,000km this offers an option for
transport of bulky goods which might otherwise require bridges to be temporarily
removed or loads to be disassembled and reassembled. The first full scale prototype is
to fly in summer 2001. Larger airships targeting unique market segments like bulky and
heavy freight transport will require innovative solutions addressing logistic aspects of
this concept. There are other developments in Russia and the US.

Lovin' Hydrogen
Maverick energy guru Amory Lovins says a profitable, pollution-free hydrogen economy is just over the horizon. It's merely a matter of taming the most powerful gas on the planet
DISCOVER Vol. 22 No. 11 (November 2001)

The Hydrogen Economy
By Jeremy Rifkin
After Oil, Clean Energy From a Fuel-Cell-Driven Global Hydrogen Web

The Home Page for Lighter-Than-Air Craft

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
tar-sands, Lougheed, Alberta, Manitoba, Arctic, Canada, Zepplin, Blimp, LTA, airships, Hindenberg, hydrogen, helium, transportation, susatainability, airtransport, lighterthanair, Moorcock, HGWells

CANADA 
The Age of the Airship May Be Dawning Again

Dirigibles ruled the skies once. Can they make a comeback?

BY JUSTIN LING FEBRUARY 29, 2020

FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSTRATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/GETTY IMAGES/OCEANSKY

You might think that the tragic end of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 marked a clear end to the airship era. The famous footage of the German airship plunging in flames became the overwhelming image of a seemingly doomed technology.

You would be wrong.

For decades, the Goodyear fleet of blimps have been the only working airships most people had a chance of seeing in real life. But a handful of companies are looking to bring back the spectacular dirigibles.

The government of Quebec will be pitching 30 million Canadian dollars (23 million in U.S. dollars) to Flying Whales, a French company, to start building its massive zeppelins. The company has only been around since 2012, and it hasn’t gotten any of its airships off the ground—yet. The plan has been derided by opposition parties, not as a flying whale but as a white elephant.

But cargo airships may actually make a tremendous amount of sense. They are relatively cheap, they can carry enormous amounts of material, and they emit significantly less greenhouse gas than other modes of transportation.

The compelling arguments for dirigible travel put these airships in a class of technology, with nuclear power and lunar colonization, that is experiencing an unexpected modern renaissance.

Flying Whales’ LCA60T model, according to the company, will be able to carry up to 60 metric tons of goods, travel up to 62 miles per hour, and serve remote areas with ease. If all goes according to plan, the company hopes to get the first airship off the ground in 2022.

There’s still a healthy dose of skepticism around the company’s lofty promises. Its main backers, prior to Quebec’s financial endorsement, have been the French National Forest Agency and the Chinese government.

Flying Whales’ website is enigmatic, and the section of the site explaining the airships’ structure isn’t particularly helpful—the description of its structure reads “what else… – Hi George :)” while if you’re looking for details on their “safe lifting gas” it reads, somewhat snarkily, “helium obviously.”

It’s that last point that might make the whole idea completely untenable: There might just not be enough helium left.

The R-100 airship, circa 1920. THEODOR HORYDCZAK/U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A slow, steady return

While the most famous airship may be the Hindenburg, it was hardly the first—nor was it the last.

For a time in the first half of the 20th century, airships were fashionable, practical, and futuristic. But their calamitous track record ultimately soured the public.

Less remembered, perhaps because its downing was never immortalized on an album cover, was the English airship R101. The dirigible was dubbed the “socialist airship,” as it was designed and built by the United Kingdom’s state aviation department. The R101 was constructed as part of a state-sponsored competition, pitting government engineers against private-sector workers. The “capitalist airship,” the R100, was designed and constructed by a scrappy engineering team on a remote airbase in Yorkshire.

The opulent socialist airship was rushed to flight, even amid a variety of problems. It took off, en route to British India, just as its capitalist competitor set off for Canada. The government airship sagged and crashed into the French countryside just a day into its voyage, killing 48 of the 54 onboard—including the aviation minister—while the private airship conducted a celebrated tour of Montreal and Toronto before heading back to London. (“Everybody’s talking about the R100,” goes the chorus of a song from the iconic francophone Canadian folk singer La Bolduc.)

Most airships of the day took off using the highly flammable hydrogen—thanks mostly to an American monopoly on helium, its nonflammable alternative. Washington had banned the export of the gas, in part over fears of the military uses of the airships, which had been used in the world’s first air raids on London during World War I.

The helium-buoyant American ships weren’t always safe, either. The USS Akron carried out several successful flights across the continent, but it was ultimately pushed down by strong winds in 1933 and crashed into the Atlantic, killing 73 people on board and two rescuers.

As U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked after the Akron went down, “ships can be replaced, but the Nation can ill afford to lose such men.” Eventually, governments stopped replacing the ships.

The USS Akron over New York City in the early 1930s. U.S. NAVY/INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGESBut it was the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, made famous by the newsreel footage of the zeppelin bursting into a ball of flames as it tried to dock at the Lakehurst air base in New Jersey, that really scuttled the industry. The United States’ decision to lift its helium ban after the crash did little to revive faith in airships. The U.S. Navy used its small fleet for anti-submarine warfare and reconnaissance in World War II, but the airship industry was effectively dead.

It would stage a comeback, in a limited way, some decades later, when Goodyear opted for nonrigid airships—blimps—for its advertising campaigns. Airship Industries came around in the 1980s, promising a return of the dirigible. Its ships, like Goodyear’s ships, had no rigid structure inside, meaning they could carry only limited cargo and no more than 14 passengers. The airships of earlier in the century had immense metal structures inside, allowing them to carry more. These new nonrigid ships were made famous by Bond villains, Pink Floyd, and, later, by Ron Paul supporters.

Fame aside, the blimps had little use for commercial air travel or cargo transport. The niche purpose of the blimps meant Airship Industries was hemorrhaging money, and it shut down by the end of the decade.

As with many other commercially nonviable products, airships later found a home in the U.S. military. There was a hope that the dirigibles, which are capable of taking off and staying aloft for prolonged periods of time, would be ideal for persistent aerial surveillance.

The contractor Northrop Grumman was awarded a $517 million contract to build a surveillance airship in 2010, and it managed to build a successful prototype in 2012. The contract was axed a year later. Raytheon was awarded nearly $3 billion for its model, which tethered the airship to a mooring and allowed for constant surveillance of a wide area for a month at a time.

One of Raytheon’s spy blimps was tested in Maryland, where it hung eerily in the sky above suburban homes. In 2015, it broke loose from its mooring and drifted haplessly through Pennsylvania, trailed by fighter jets, before crashing in a field. Raytheon’s hopes of building more surveillance dirigibles crashed with it.

A similar program in Afghanistan, which became notorious among Kabul residents, saw even worse results. The tethers that kept the Big Brother balloons in place were notorious for snaring helicopter blades—one incident killed five American and British service members.

An aerial visualization of the Ocean Sky airship. KIRT X THOMSEN


A commercial appeal?

The market for military airships and commercial blimps remained limited thanks to past failures, though not dead entirely.

The cruise company OceanSky is forging ahead with plans to send a passenger airship to the Arctic, using a ship originally designed under the U.S. military’s surveillance program, with a planned voyage in 2023.

Many are banking that the real future of airships, however, is in cargo.

In the vast expanses of the Canadian north, there has long been a need for reliable transportation. Many communities are only accessible by road when winter rolls around and the ground and lakes are solid enough to drive on, if they are accessible by road at all. That means basic goods need to be stockpiled when the weather is cold or flown in by cargo plane—never mind supplies to build long-term infrastructure. Many of these remote communities are reliant on gas generators and are facing shortages of reliable housing stock.

The airships also promise to be a boon for economic development, if they work.

In 2016, a junior mining company in Quebec inked an agreement with U.K.-based Straightline Aviation to use a design being developed by Lockheed Martin to haul rare earth minerals from a remote open-pit mine—the road that was initially planned would have cut across a caribou migration path. That plan went belly-up when the minerals company went bankrupt, although Straightline is forging ahead with plans to offer commercial and tourism flights.

The interior of the Ocean Sky airship. HYBRID AIR VEHICLES LTD AND DESIGN Q

Stranded resources and communities are a policy concern in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia, and elsewhere. Flights are expensive and carbon dioxide-intensive, and they require airport infrastructure. Shipping is more viable as Arctic ice melts, but that often requires deep-water ports and can have damaging impacts on marine life. It’s part of why people keep coming back to airships.

That’s the niche Quebec Premier François Legault is hoping Flying Whale can fill in the province’s remote north.

It’s why the French forestry sector is interested in the ships as well. The promise of lifting lumber from far-off places earned the company praise from French President Emmanuel Macron as one of the “industries of the future.”

The opportunity is also caveated with an array of risks and problems. There is no guarantee that the airships will even fly in the frigid north—Le Journal de Quebec reported that the airships will need a significant amount of water, which may be hard to come by amid Arctic temperatures.

Quebec seems unphased.

“If we don’t take risks, we go nowhere,” Legault told reporters earlier in February. Quebec’s investment earned it a 25 percent stake in the project, which in turn brought derision from opposition politicians—one questioned whether the government was inhaling helium when it made the decision.

The money puts Quebec on par with China in the project—Beijing put in $4.9 million for its 24.9 percent stake, through the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China General and the Ministry of Science and Technology. China has plenty of Arctic ambitions itself—and vast distances to cover in its underpopulated west.

The Hindenburg disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937. FINE ART IMAGES/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES


A lack of lift

There’s one massive drawback for the airship industry: The world is almost out of helium.

In recent years, helium prices have skyrocketed as supply has dwindled. Far from just being used in party balloons and blimps, the gas is necessary for MRI scanners and rocket engines. Stockpiles of helium often escape, and are wasted, during other extractive projects. While there have been shortages before, helium is a nonrenewable resource and can take an enormously long time to generate—estimates suggest the earth’s supply could be gone this century.

If the world runs out of helium, it’s not clear that there’s a good alternative. The dangers of hydrogen are well established, and the gas behind the Hindenburg disaster is unlikely to make an air travel comeback.

Hypothetically, there could be an airship lifted by a vacuum—that is, by material that can contain nothing at all inside but withstand the atmospheric pressure from the outside. It is, at this point, science fiction, although NASA has posited that some kind of vacuum airship could eventually be used to explore the surface of Mars.

Airship companies seem satisfied with helium for the time being. OceanSky cruises has a reassuring FAQ on its website, telling those looking to join them on an airship trip to the North Pole that 600 of their cruise ships “would account for just 1% of annual helium consumption” and that each ship “stays filled with the same helium as from its inception, less a tiny annual leakage.”

If these airships can take off despite carrying a century of failed projects, a lack of its necessary resource, and economic justifications that still seem more wishful thinking than reality—it might just be the return of the zeppelin.


Justin Ling is a journalist based in Toronto.

FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE

Hydrogen gas-fuelled airships could spur development in remote communities
Barry E. Prentice, Professor of Supply Chain Management, University of Manitoba 3 days ago

What do tomatoes, hemp and hydrogen gas have in common? Only one thing: they were all victims of misinformation that banned their use. Harmless products that could have had a positive role in the economy and society were shunned for generations. 

© (Piqsels) Hydrogen gas was banned for use in airships based on misinformation and outright falsehoods 100 years ago.

It seems incredible today to think that Europeans believed tomatoes were poisonous for about 200 years. People did get sick, and some died after eating tomatoes. The culprit was pewter dishes favoured by the upper classes. Tomato acid leached out enough lead out to be poisonous.

The advent of porcelain dishware and Italian pizza finally sorted out the real problem. But once a myth is born, it can be hard for the truth to emerge. Europe lagged a long time behind North America in tomato consumption.

The prohibition of hemp, the fibre of the cannabis plant, has a more nuanced story and competing explanations. Some accounts sound like conspiracy theories.

The alleged conspirators were industrialists in paper, plastics and pharmaceuticals who sought drug regulations to eliminate hemp as their competitor. This is difficult to prove, but economist George Stigler’s seminal article in 1971 on the economics of regulation lends support to the theory.

 

© (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) In this August 2019 photo, rows plants are shown at an industrial hemp farm in Michigan.

The best-documented cause of hemp’s vilification is racism. Notable racist slurs by U.S. government official Harry Anslinger, who drafted the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, leave no doubt of his bias. As commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he targeted racialized minorities who used hemp plants.

The fear-mongering has ended in most places and important uses for hemp and cannabis are making a valuable contribution to health care, nutrition and fibre. But the stigma of the false claims continue, as does prohibition in many places.
Hydrogen ban

Unlike the prohibition on hemp, hydrogen gas bans in the United States and Canada are extremely narrow. It’s legal to use hydrogen for almost every conceivable purpose, except one: as a gas to provide buoyancy for airships, more commonly known as blimps (although there are differences between airships, blimps and dirigibles).

In fact, Canada still has a ban enshrined in its air regulations that states: “Hydrogen is not an acceptable lifting gas for use in airships.”

Canada’s ban on this use of hydrogen is strange given that Canada has never had an airship industry. The origins of the false information that led to this ban on the use of hydrogen are even more surprising.

Helium was discovered in natural gas in Kansas in 1903, and an experimental refinery was built in Texas in 1915. At great expense, a few barrage balloons were filled with helium during the First World War.

After the war, the need for helium was unclear. But officials from the U.S. Bureau of Mines wanted to protect their newly established helium refinery. They took advantage of the Roma airship accident in 1922 to sell helium to the military.

The Roma was a hydrogen-filled, Italian-built airship sold to the U.S. army. During trials, its rudder broke and the airship crashed in Norfolk, Va., hitting power lines during its descent. All 34 crew members were lost. 

 

© (National Archives) The Italian airship Roma flying over Norfolk, Va., in 1921.

Spreading a falsehood via the media that the crew would have survived had the airship had been filled with helium, the Bureau of Mines was given an audience in Washington, D.C. Before Congress, they staged a demonstration with two balloons and a burning splint.

The one filled with helium doused the burning splint. The one marked hydrogen would have put the flame out too, if it were more than 75 per cent pure, but contaminated hydrogen gas is explosive. When the burning splint touched the balloon, it went off like a cannon, rattling the windows in Congress.

Based on this poorly designed high school chemistry level experiment, U.S. politicians banned the use of hydrogen in airships.
Rubber-stamped laws

After the Second World War, when the U.S. became the dominant world air power, its regulations were rubber-stamped into the laws of other nations, including Canada. This is how Canada came to have a regulation banning hydrogen in airships that is grounded in neither science nor engineering research. The ban stems from a political decision made in a foreign country 98 years ago based on misinformation.

Hydrogen gas is increasingly heralded as the mobile energy source of the green economy. Hydrogen fuel cells are used for electric cars, buses, boats, forklifts, trains and recently a converted Piper airplane.

Read more: Hydrogen trains are coming – can they get rid of diesel for good?

It is perfectly legal to carry hydrogen in a high-pressure container to power any vehicle, including an airship, but not if carried in a zero-pressure container (gas cell) to lift the airship.

The prohibition on hydrogen has held back research and created doubts about the economic viability of airships that must depend on scarce, finite supplies of helium.

Lies and misinformation have consequences. Canada needs a transportation solution to the chronic problems of food insecurity, crowded housing and poverty in remote Indigenous communities.

Hydrogen-filled cargo airships could do for the Northern economy what the railways did for Western Canada 125 years ago. In the 21st century, myths and misrepresentations should not go unchallenged. Regulatory decisions made when we were still hand-cranking cars should either be justified or removed from the books.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Barry E. Prentice owns shares in Buoyant Aircraft Systems International (BASI), an airship research organization with no production and only one employee. He is also the president of ISO Polar, a not-for-profit think tank that encourages the use of cargo airships for northern transportation.

AIRSHIPS

Ghost islands of the Arctic: The world’s ‘northern-most island’ isn’t the first to be erased from the map

Kevin Hamilton, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Hawaii 9/9/2022

THE CONVERSATION 


In 2021, an expedition off the icy northern Greenland coast spotted what appeared to be a previously uncharted island. It was small and gravelly, and it was declared a contender for the title of the most northerly known land mass in the world. The discoverers named it Qeqertaq Avannarleq – Greenlandic for “the northern most island.”

PHOTO © Martin Nissen These 'islands' are on the move.

But there was a mystery afoot in the region. Just north of Cape Morris Jesup, several other small islands had been discovered over the decades, and then disappeared.

Some scientists theorized that these were rocky banks that had been pushed up by sea ice.

But when a team of Swiss and Danish surveyors traveled north to investigate this “ghost islands” phenomenon, they discovered something else entirely. They announced their findings in September 2022: These elusive islands are actually large icebergs grounded at the sea bottom. They likely came from a nearby glacier, where other newly calved icebergs, covered with gravel from landslides, were ready to float off.

Video player from: YouTube (Privacy Policy, Terms)

This was not the first such disappearing act in the high Arctic, or the first need to erase land from the map. Nearly a century ago, an innovative airborne expedition redrew the maps of large swaths of the Barents Sea.

The view from a zeppelin in 1931

The 1931 expedition emerged from American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s plan for a spectacular publicity stunt.

Hearst proposed having the Graf Zeppelin, then the world’s largest airship, fly to the North Pole for a meeting with a submarine that would travel under the ice. This ran into practical difficulties and Hearst abandoned the plan, but the notion of using the Graf Zeppelin to conduct geographic and scientific investigations of the high Arctic was taken up by an international polar science committee.

The airborne expedition they devised would employ pioneering technologies and make important geographical, meteorological and magnetic discoveries in the Arctic – including remapping much of the Barents Sea.

The expedition was known as the Polarfahrt – “polar voyage” in German. Despite the international tensions at the time, the zeppelin carried a team of German, Soviet and U.S. scientists and explorers.

Among them were Lincoln Ellsworth, a wealthy American and experienced Arctic explorer who would write the first scholarly account of the Polarfahrt and its geographical discoveries. Two important Soviet scientists also participated: the brilliant meteorologist Pavel Molchanov and the expedition’s chief scientist, Rudolf Samoylovich, who performed magnetic measurements. In charge of the meteorological operations was Ludwig Weickmann, director of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Leipzig.

The expedition’s chronicler was Arthur Koestler, a young journalist who would later become famous for his anti-communist novel “Darkness at Noon,” depicting totalitarianism turning on its own party loyalists

.

© Wikimedia Built in 1928 and longer than two football fields, the Graf Zeppelin was normally used for ultra-luxurious commercial passenger transportation. Financing for the science mission came in part from the sale of postcards with stamps specially issued by the postal authorities of Germany and the Soviet Union.

The five-day trip took them north over the Barents Sea as far as 82 degrees north latitude, and then eastward for hundreds of miles before returning southwestward.

Koestler provided daily reports via shortwave radio that appeared in newspapers around the world.

“The experience of this swift, silent and effortless rising, or rather falling upwards into the sky, is beautiful and intoxicating,” Koestler wrote in his 1952 autobiography. “… it gives one the complete illusion of having escaped the bondage of the earth’s gravity.

"We hovered in the Arctic air for several days, moving at a leisurely average of 60 miles per hour and often stopping in mid-air to complete a photographic survey or release small weather balloons. It all had a charm and a quiet excitement comparable to a journey on the last sailing ship in an era of speed boats.”

‘The disadvantage of not existing’

The high latitude regions the Polarfahrt passed over were incredibly remote. In the late 19th century, Austrian explorer Julius von Payer reported the discovery of Franz Josef Land, an archipelago of nearly 200 islands in the Barents Sea, but initially there had been doubts about Franz Josef Land’s existence.

The Polarfahrt confirmed the existence of Franz Josef Land, but it would reveal that the maps produced by the early explorers of the high Arctic had startling deficiencies.

For the expedition, the Graf Zeppelin had been outfitted with wide-angle cameras that allowed detailed photography of the surface below. The slowly moving Zeppelin was ideally suited for this purpose and could make leisurely surveys that were not possible from fixed-wing aircraft overflights.

“We spent the remainder of [July 27] making a geographical survey of Franz Josef Land,” Koestler wrote.

“Our first objective was an island called Albert Edward Land. But that was easier said than done, for Albert Edward Land had the disadvantage of not existing. It could be found on every map of the Arctic, but not in the Arctic itself …

"Next objective: Harmsworth Land. Funny as it sounds Harmsworth Land didn’t exist either. Where it ought to have been, there was nothing but the black polar sea and the reflection of the white Zeppelin.

"Heaven knows whether the explorer who put these islands on the map (I believe it was Payer) had been a victim of a mirage, mistaking some icebergs for land … At any rate, as of July 27, 1931, they have been officially erased.”

The expedition would also discover six islands and redraw the coastal outlines of many others.
A revolutionary way to measure the atmosphere

The expedition was also remarkable for the instruments Molchanov tested aboard the Graf Zeppelin – including his newly invented “radiosondes.” His technology would revolutionize meteorological observations and led to instruments that atmospheric scientists like me rely on today.

Until 1930, measuring the temperature high in the atmosphere was extremely challenging for meteorologists.

© Radiosonde Museum of North America Pavel Molchanov and Ludwig Weickmann prepare to launch a weather balloon.

They used so-called registering sondes that recorded the temperature and pressure by weather balloon. A stylus would make a continuous trace on paper or some other medium, but to read it, scientists would have to find the sonde package after it dropped, and it typically drifted many miles from the launch point. This was particularly impractical in remote areas such as the Arctic.

Molchanov’s device could radio back the temperature and pressure at frequent intervals during the balloon flight. Today, balloon-borne radiosondes are launched daily at several hundred stations worldwide.

The Polarfahrt was Molchanov’s chance for a spectacular demonstration. The Graf Zeppelin generally flew in the lowest few thousand feet of the atmosphere, but could serve as a platform to release weather balloons that could ascend much higher, acting as remotely reporting “robots” in the upper atmosphere.

© Radiosonde Museum of North America. To launch radiosondes from the zeppelin, weather balloons were weighted to sink at first. The weight was designed to drop off, allowing the balloon to later rise through the atmosphere.

Molchanov’s hydrogen-filled weather balloons provided the first observations of the stratospheric temperatures near the pole. Remarkably, he found that at heights of 10 miles the air at the pole was actually much warmer than at the equator.
Fate of the protagonists

The Polarfahrt was a final flourish of international scientific cooperation at the beginning of the 1930s, a period that saw a catastrophic rise of authoritarian politics and international conflict. By 1941, the U.S., Soviet Union and Germany would all be at war.

Molchanov and Samoylovich became victims of Stalin’s secret police. As a Hungarian Jew, Koestler would have his life and career shadowed by the politics of the age. He eventually found refuge in England, where he built a career as a novelist, essayist and historian of science.

© Wikimedia The Graf Zeppelin was designed for luxury air travel.

The Graf Zeppelin continued in commercial passenger service principally on trans-Atlantic flights. But one of history’s most iconic tragedies soon ended the era of zeppelin travel. In May 1937, the Graf Zeppelin’s younger sister airship, the Hindenburg, caught fire while trying to land in New Jersey. The Graf Zeppelin was dismantled in 1940 to provide scrap metal for the German war effort.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

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Nunavut MP Lori Idlout calls for Nutrition North reform


Thu, December 1, 2022 at 7:09 a.m.·3 min read

Nutrition North Canada needs to support Nunavut hunters instead of subsidizing grocery companies, said Nunavut MP Lori Idlout in Ottawa Wednesday.

Idlout teamed up with fellow NDP MP Niki Ashton, from Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, to call on the federal Liberal government to reform the government-funded program, which Idlout says doesn’t serve Nunavummiut and is a subsidy for companies instead.

“I completely and wholeheartedly agree that the Nutrition North program needs to have an overhaul,” Idlout said during a joint press conference the two MPs held on Parliament Hill.

Nutrition North Canada operates a collection of programs that meant to improve northern residents’ food security — meaning having better and sustainable access to food.

Idlout said that one of the issues with Nutrition North is that it subsidizes fresh produce that’s flown in from the south, which, during the fall and winter months cannot be relied upon due to poor weather conditions.

Idlout held up various pictures of common grocery store items — apples, bottled water, chips — and noted the price differences between Nunavut and Ottawa.

For example, in Ottawa, four tomatoes cost $1.77, whereas in Nunavut that would cost $8.19, she said.

The main change Idlout would like to see is for the program to better support hunters in the territory because “one bullet could provide for 200 to 300 pounds of meat.”

Nutrition North currently has the Harvesters Support Grant which gives money to communities so they can buy harvesting equipment, gas, meals for elders, community feasts and more. The money is sent to Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. for each community.

Idlout said the hunters she has spoken to said they didn’t know that the program existed and that “there’s definitely a disparity between what the federal government is saying and what the communities are hearing.”

NTI did not respond Wednesday to Nunatsiaq News’ questions about where that money goes. The organization has application forms for the program for reach region on its website.

Asked how Idlout would like to see the program benefit Nunavummiut who rely on grocery stores for food, she said that if hunters are better supported, they can provide food for community members who aren’t hunters themselves, or have hunters in their family.

Kyle Allen, spokesperson for Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, the department that administers Nutrition North, said the federal government has increased its funding for the various programs under its wing.

He said the harvesters support grant was developed in partnership with northern communities and supported more than 5,500 harvesters.

The federal government also has programs outside of Nutrition North to help northerners with the increasing cost of living, such as reducing child-care fees and increasing the Canadian Workers Benefit.

“Many Canadians face real challenges with the increased cost of living,” he said.

“That is why we have a fiscally responsible and compassionate plan that is targeted to low-income families and individuals and support for the most vulnerable.”

Allen did not answer if the Liberals would commit to reviewing the program.

David Venn, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Nunatsiaq News

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for AIRSHIPS NORTH 

Airships for city hops could cut flying’s CO2 emissions by 90%

Bedford-based blimp maker unveils short-haul routes such as Liverpool-Belfast that it hopes to serve by 2025

Hybrid Air Vehicles hopes to produce 12 of its Airlander 10 airships a year by 2025, 

each capable of carrying 100 people on short-haul flights. Illustration: Hybrid Air Vehicles

Rupert Neate

@RupertNeate

Wed 26 May 2021 

For those fancying a trip from Liverpool to Belfast or Barcelona to the Balearic Islands but concerned about the carbon footprint of aeroplane travel, a small Bedford-based company is promising a surprising solution: commercial airships.

Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), which has developed a new environmentally friendly airship 84 years after the Hindenburg disaster, on Wednesday named a string of routes it hoped to serve from 2025.

The routes for the 100-passenger Airlander 10 airship include Barcelona to Palma de Mallorca in four and a half hours. The company said the journey by airship would take roughly the same time as aeroplane travel once getting to and from the airport was taken into account, but would generate a much smaller carbon footprint. HAV said the CO2 footprint per passenger on its airship would be about 4.5kg, compared with about 53kg via jet plane.

Other routes planned include Liverpool to Belfast, which would take five hours and 20 minutes; Oslo to Stockholm, in six and a half hours; and Seattle to Vancouver in just over four hours.

HAV, which has in the past attracted funding from Peter Hambro, a founder of Russian gold-miner Petropavlovsk, and Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, said its aircraft was “ideally suited to inter-city mobility applications like Liverpool to Belfast and Seattle to Vancouver, which Airlander can service with a tiny fraction of the emissions of current air options”.

Tom Grundy, HAV’s chief executive, who compares the Airlander to a “fast ferry”, said: “This isn’t a luxury product it’s a practical solution to challenges posed by the climate crisis.”

He said that 47% of regional aeroplane flights connect cities that are less than 230 miles (370km) apart, and emit a huge about of carbon dioxide doing so.

“We’ve got aircraft designed to travel very long distances going very short distances, when there is actually a better solution,” Grundy said. “How much longer will we expect to have the luxury of travelling these short distances with such a big carbon footprint?”

Grundy said the hybrid-electric Airlander 10 could make the same connections with 10% of the carbon footprint from 2025, and with even smaller emissions in the future when the airships were expected to be all-electric powered.

“It’s an early and quick win for the climate,” he said. “Especially when you use this to get over an obstacle like water or hills.”

HAV said it was in discussions with a number of airlines to operate the routes, and expected to announce partnerships and airline customers in the next few months. The company has already signed a deal to deliver an airship to luxury Swedish travel firm OceanSky Cruises, which has said it intends to use the craft to offer “experiential travel” over the North Pole with Arctic explorer Robert Swan.

Grundy said the company was in the final stages of settling on a location for its airship production line, which he hoped would be in the UK. He said the company would hire about 500 people directly involved in building the craft, and it would support a further 1,500 jobs in the supply chain. The company currently employs about 70 people, mostly in design, at its offices in Bedford. He said the company aimed to produce about 12 airships a year from 2025.

The craft was originally designed as a surveillance vehicle for intelligence missions in Afghanistan. HAV claims independent estimates put the value of the airship market at $50bn over the next 20 years. It aims to sell 265 of its Airlander craft over that period.

The £25m Airlander 10 prototype undertook six test flights, some of which ended badly. It crashed in 2016 on its second test flight, after a successful 30-minute maiden trip. HAV tweeted at the time: “Airlander sustained damage on landing during today’s flight. No damage was sustained mid-air or as a result of a telegraph pole as reported.”

The aircraft, which can take off and land from almost any flat surface, reached heights of 7,000ft (2,100m) and speeds of up to 50 knots (57mph) during its final tests. The company has had UK government backing and grants from the European Union.

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