MAN’S AIRSHIP DREAM BATTERED, BUT SURVIVES
Things were looking pretty good for Barry Prentice at 5:30 p.m. on July 20. He was at home as the weather reports rolled in about a wild storm heading for Winnipeg, bringing rain, high winds and tornadoes with it. At 5:30 p.m., all was tranquil.
Prentice, a professor of supply management at the University of Manitoba, figured his baby — the Sky Whale — an airship (picture a blimp, only with a rigid interior skeleton) prototype he spent five years and $1 million of his and a partner’s life savings developing, would safely ride out the gnarly weather in their research hangar at St. Andrews Airport northeast of the city.
Things were looking less OK three hours later. The sky was black. Branches were blown from the trees. Prentice hurried to his computer to check on the security feed from the hangar. The feed was dead.
“I remember thinking, ‘Uh oh. That’s not good,’” he says. “An hour later, I get a call from the airport manager saying our building had been flattened. I didn’t know how bad the damage was, and so I hoped it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.”
Unfortunately, it was worse.
Mary Prentice is the professor’s wife of 40 years. She answered the couple’s home phone on a recent afternoon while her husband wiped sawdust from his glasses. The 66-year-old academic had spent the morning at the airship hangar — the only one of its kind in Canada, now a giant tangle of steel and broken airship bits — sifting through rubble, salvaging what he could. So far: a wheel, a nose cone and, thankfully, the Sky Whale’s plans. The drawings represent Prentice’s dream, one he has had for 40 years: to build a cost-effective, environmentally friendly, hydrogenfilled — though currently using helium — means of transporting goods to remote northern communities. In other words: an airship.
“Once you see the potential a modern airship could have, it is hard to ignore,” Prentice says. “Of course, why someone dives in headlong, as my colleague Dale George and I did in 2011 — maybe a good shrink could tell you.”
Good shrinks cost good money, and excess cash is something Prentice and George are in short supply of. Their hangar was uninsured. Their financial backers were themselves.
“We’ve got enough to pay rent on the space,” Prentice says. “But we don’t have enough cash to even think about rebuilding.”
Though battered and broke, the professor’s enthusiasm remains undiminished. And that’s the thing about airships: they have an addictive hold on their true believers, an eclectic roll call of characters, including British rocker Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden fame. Dickinson’s heavy metal ballad Empire of the Clouds is about — yes — an airship, and he is an investor in the Airlander, the gargantuan airship-airplane-helicopter-hybrid nicknamed the Flying Bum that embarked on its maiden flight in the U.K. this week.
Igor Pasternak, a Ukrainian-born California-based engineer, is another devotee. Pasternak has received $50 million in funding from the U.S. military to develop his creations.
“It is an addiction,” he told the New Yorker in a recent article.
What the Pasternaks and the Prentices argue in tones so reasonable that it would be utterly unreasonable to discount them, is: What if expensive highway projects and dirty-jet-fuel-guzzling transport planes weren’t required to tie remote communities, say, in the Canadian North to major centres? What if all-weather gravel roads were made obsolete by several-footballfield-long flying bums and floating sky whales?
Transport Canada responded to an email request for comment on the potential for airships in Canada — pro, con or otherwise — by saying that they are “monitoring the evolution of the industry.” Prentice, more or less, is the industry in Canada. To get his version of the airship built and goods and people moving, he estimates he would need about $50 million. All he has now is enough to cover the rent.
“What I have said for years now is, ‘Fine, if you don’t like my idea of using airships in the North, OK, but what is your idea?’”
“Then I get my pencil ready to write down something, but all I ever get is silence. And until my idea is disproved — and it should be given an opportunity to be disproved — and if it is then, well, OK, I’ll go hang out on a beach somewhere, because I got better things to do than this.”