I used to do a lot of work in the Canadian Arctic. I’m pretty experienced with logistics up in that part of the world and I really don’t see how this is going to work out successfully…
When you get high enough, we’d end up having to drain the oil out of the plane and bring it indoors over night. That is safer than starting a fire under the engine when it’s -58c. I can’t even count how many days we lost to weather, I once paid a guy to sit in Rankin Inlet for 68 days over the course of a year waiting for flights to come back to Winnipeg from a project in Chesterfield inlet. How’s a balloon going to handle winds that stop 737’s from flying? They seem to be saying it’ll be impacted the same as a plane, but aerodynamics make that appear impossible.
This would be a great help for our Northern brothers and sisters, but I think it’s still a pipe dream.
Did CBC accidentally publish a Beaverton article?
The northern territories, and Nunavut in particular, have some pretty unique supply issues. They all suffer from a lack of infrastructure, and Nunavut especially has all those Arctic islands which are only accessible by sea during the short summer and by air otherwise, or only by air period for some of the communities located more towards the interior where the ice pack never fully goes away. This results in some very high food prices.
This idea is an attempt to increase shipping volume to the north in an affordable way. Whether it’s actually workable or a harebrained scheme I’m not qualified to say, though.
