Slurpees & Murder

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The past 75 years have not been kind to the concept of the airship.
   
Ask most people to name whatever two real-life airships first come to mind, and they’ll come up with "the Hindenburg" and "the, uh… what’s the one that blew up? Is that the Hindenburg?" (Classic-rock lovers might also answer with "that one on the cover of Led Zeppelin 1," which is the Hindenburg.) You may luck out and find a sports fan or a marketing enthusiast who correctly notes the Budweiser, Metlife and Goodyear blimps — but aside from those occasional modern instances of corporate branding and novelty stadium camera angles, the overwhelming public perception of the airship is that it goes up, malfunctions and comes back down again. The knowledge that three Goodyear blimps have crashed in the last 13 years probably doesn’t help matters.
   
The use and viability of airships were already on the decline prior to the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, mind you; folks had figured out they weren’t using airships for anything that couldn’t be done faster and more reliably with airplanes, so the well-publicized explosion in the sky over New Jersey was just an emphatic final nail in the coffin of popular airship travel.
   
I’ve always had a soft spot for airships, though — not because of any real-life exposure or experiences, but because Final Fantasy III came out for the Super Nintendo when I was 10 and it was just my favouritest of favourite things. You putz around on foot in that game for a while at first, following the story and doing what you’re told, but as soon as you get an airship (and it is a very nice airship), the whole world of the game opens itself up to you. Go anywhere! Do anything! All of my natural predilections for exploration and wanderlust and chiptune music, wrapped up into one dirigible-shaped package.
   
So I am an easy sell for the idea that airships could find a place in our modern world — particularly in Canada, a country where about 70% of the land mass lacks surface infrastructure, and particularly in Manitoba, a province in which the roads to many northern communities are impermanent and often impassable. (We make them out of ice, so really, we can only expect so much.)
   
You can imagine my intrigue last month when the big news story out of the University of Manitoba engineering school was the unveiling of an 80-foot prototype blimp, a literal trial balloon, named the Giizhigo-Misameg — Oji-Cree for "Sky Whale," which is probably the most Japanese-video game name they could have given it. ("The ship of light from the moon… the Sky Whale!") While the idea of an all-weather airship supply network is still experimental and largely hypothetical — no one’s ever figured out how to coldproof an airship yet and, in Manitoba, that’s kind of important — the testing begins this spring to see what the craft might be able to accomplish. Yellowknife’s Discovery Air hopes to begin similar research by the end of 2014. I, for one, support it; my stance on the matter is that airships are awesome, and I hope we get a thousand of them.
   
Of course, I can’t say that my position isn’t heavily influenced by the continued enthusiasm of my inner 10-year-old — the one who wants to commandeer an airship, fly it out to wherever the hell it’ll go, and roam the plains and forests for hours looking for adventure and treasures and things to fight with a sword. But even if airships turn out not to be viable winter transport, I bet we could figure out something to do with them; Winnipeg would only need to hang onto a couple of them to be the Airship Capital of Canada by default, and so long as we don’t blow them up or crash them into things, I’m sure we could find plenty of people willing to ride them. People other then me, I mean.
   
First, though, let’s see how those tests play out. Keep watching the skies!
   
James Hope Howard only returns to town to get supplies and a tent.
   
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