Hybrid Air Vehicles May Help Conquer the Arctic

(Image: HAV)
Travelling through the Arctic is notoriously difficult and climate change is making it even harder. But there may be a way to literally rise above the problem: the latest generation of lighter-than-air vehicles, or more accurately, Hybrid Air Vehicles. Discovery Air, a Canadian company, has contracted with Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) to for an order on the order of magnitude of 45 new airships based on this new technology, to be used across the Northwest Territories of Canada.
Possible uses range from carrying cut timber out of the forest or bringing supplies to settlers in remote villages, transportation in Arctic Canada has proven to be an extrememly daunting process. Most transportation is either by air transport or bush pilot, whose carrying capacity is limited; by boat, whose access is extremely limited; or by ice road, which is limited in time frame to periods of frozen roads over arctic lakes.
Rising winter temperatures, due to climate change, are likely to make Canada's ice roads less stable and reduce the amount of time in winter in which they can safely be used.
HAV says the vessels are technically neither airships nor blimps. To achieve a large part of their lift, they  make use of non-flammable helium --- often mixed with air --- they also get a substantial portion of their lift from the aerodynamic design of the outer envelope, the airship's equivalent of a fuselage.
HAV already has a major contract for hybrid vehicles with the US Defence Department for long-endurance airships to be used for ISR : Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance.
The airships that Discovery Air has ordered are HAV's model 366, which HAV spokespersons say can carry 50 tonnes if they take off horizontally like an airplane and about 30 tonnes if they take off vertically. Not even the largest helicopters in the world can match that, they explain.
One hundred and ten metres (360  feet) long, the vessels can reach altitudes of almost 3000 metres (9800 feet) and can take off and land almost anywhere. Smaller cargo can fit in the fuselage or can hang beneath the airship for shorter ones. The possibility of remote operation, using radio control much like a model airplane or the latest military drones, is an interesting future possibility.