A Toronto company hopes to transform the way critical medical and hospital supplies are delivered to remote areas in the world through its unique solar-powered airship. It's been a dream of Canadian entrepreneur Jay Godsall since he was in high school and now, thanks in part to an in-progress crowd-funded
IndieGoGo campaign and potential support from investors, the project is finally taking off.
Thirty years in the making, the aircraft is Toronto-company Solar Ship's most important innovation. It's a hybrid between a bush plane and an airship, powered by solar panels, lifted by helium, and designed to access hard-to-reach places, "where roads don't exist and planes can't land."
The company has built four prototypes since 2009, but the real mission of the IndieGoGo campaign is to establish enough funding to begin delivering medical supplies to villages in Cape Town, Africa. The company is seeking $1 million through crowd-funding and investors to cover the costs of medical supplies, aircraft development, and training.
“Airships are older than radios, older than automobiles,” Godsall told BBC, “but no one has quite had the mission to do something like this with one.”
There is some backlash. The crafts are expensive and a worldwide helium shortage may cause problems, the BBC article says. In addition, these aircrafts may not be well received in communities unfamiliar with giant hovering aircrafts. “The eastern Congo is not a place you can just pull up in your hospital ship," Dr. Amy Lehman, founder of Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic, an organization that uses small boats to supply medical treatment around the great lake, including eastern Congo, told BBC.
Despite this, Godsall claims the company has funding should the IndieGoGo campaign prove ineffective (at press time, the campaign had raised just under $7,000). He says the company's persistence is the key to its success. “We build em’, fly em’, build em’ and fly em’, and now, we’ve nailed it.”
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Original source: BBC