Hovering on the Edge: Will airships go mainstream… again?

Mode skipper

“Our first target is oil and gas, and major works in remote areas,” said Hubert de Contenson, CEO of Hybrid Air Freighters, who cites arctic region mining as an example. “We don’t have difficulties convincing prospective customers with these arguments.”

The Paris-based logistics company, which calls itself a provider of logistics and transport solutions, made headlines earlier this year when it signed a letter of intent to purchase up to 12 Lockheed Martin Hybrid Airships, at a total value of approximately $500 million.

But Hybrid Air Freighters is already looking further ahead, towards what de Contenson calls multimodal alternatives. “We think the market for multimodal is even bigger than the market for remote,” he said. In Europe, de Contenson explained, harbors, roads and rail are all congested. In the coming years, he expects rapid increases in cargo flows throughout Europe. “Industrial companies are fed up with the delays and the slow pace of the trucks, the traffic jams, tunnels, mountains,” de Contenson said. “Some of our targets would be happy to address that.”

Hybrid Air Freighters may be on to something. Bala Ganesh, UPS director of corporate retail segment marketing, recently wrote, “Roads will get more congested, and the demand for goods will further test already strained transportation networks.”

That’s especially true in Europe, where, for north-south routes, truckers must contend with the Alps, and the tunnels, congestion and weather conditions that mountainous terrain entails. Traveling east-to-west, roads degrade the farther east one travels, de Contenson said. Then there are the ports, where “French and Spanish ports are not well organized to unload the large container ships.” As trade increases, Europe’s infrastructure is about to be severly tested, and not everyone is sure that it will succeed.

Hybrid Air Freighters has an alternative. Instead of trucking containers from Germany across the Alps, transferring them to ships in Genoa or Marseilles, and then repeating the process at an African port, why not transport the cargo in one leg aboard an airship? “We are talking to people who have serious volumes that they need to forward between Africa and Europe, and they usually go by truck to Genoa in Italy or Marseilles, France,” de Contenson said. “We could easily go from Germany directly to Africa instead of stopping our trucks or rail at ports in Europe, transferring to ships, and then back to trucks in Africa.”