Flying Whales airships at Hydro-Québec: not for tomorrow

While doubts cast a shadow over the controversial Flying Whales airship projects in France, Hydro-Québec recognizes that it still needs time to validate several elements before being able to use them on our vast territory, we have learned. The Journal.

“We will evaluate the technology. It is too early to comment further, because several validations are required before considering its use in our projects,” indicated to the Journal Caroline Des Rosiers, spokesperson for Hydro-Québec.

Inflated promises, technical obstacles, environmental risks… a Radio France investigation has lifted the veil in recent months on the French company Flying Whales, which obtained $75 million in public funds from the Legault government.

“The government made a mistake. The appropriate expression in English would be to throw good money after bad», Estimates Steven Ambler, professor of economics, who teaches investment and risk at the master’s and doctoral level at UQAM.

“I believe that the technical problems and especially the price of helium are quite decisive. If there was a really good chance that it would be profitable, public funds would not have been necessary,” he analyzes.

Four years ago, The Journal revealed that Quebec had invested $30 million in Flying Whales projects deemed unrealistic by experts commissioned under the previous Liberal government, in addition to paying three times more than its Chinese business partner at the time for its participation.

Trois-Rivières or Sherbrooke

The latest news is that Flying Whales is juggling between Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières to build its cargo airship balloon assembly site in Quebec.

“We are still well positioned,” says the Journal the mayor of Trois-Rivières, who met the company’s managers in Paris recently.

However, last May, the Radio France Investigation Unit investigated the company. “Flying Whales: 90 million euros of public money invested and still no airship prototype,” our colleagues headlined.

In this report, it is said that Flying Whales claims to be able to market a device without needing to make a prototype first.

«Shared risk»

For David Rancourt, associate professor at the University of Sherbrooke and director of AéroUdeS, who collaborated on Flying Whales research, the game is worth the effort.

“It’s a shared risk. There are many countries that have invested in the project. The risk versus benefit is interesting, especially for the wind aspect,” he says.

Like him, Barry Prentrice, professor and director of the University of Manitoba Transport Institute (UMTI), is convinced that we need airships, if only to transport wind turbine blades and minerals from corners. set back.

“I would have liked it to be done in Manitoba. We are talking about thousands of jobs,” he goes so far as to say.

Expert Mehran Ebrahimi, full professor in the management department at ESG UQAM, also thinks that we must focus on this type of project so that Quebec remains the third aerospace hub in the world. “There are people who criticize because the technology is not mature,” he admits.

“When we invest public money, we need guarantees to know what will belong to us, in terms of intellectual property, production,” he notes.

“Even if a project fails, we have learned so much that this too has value,” underlines the director of the International Observatory of Aeronautics and Civil Aviation.

And the promised jobs?

While in June 2022, Quebec supported that “more than a hundred well-paid jobs should be created or maintained over the next three years,” Flying Whales indicated to Journal have only around thirty “collaborators” in Montreal.

“Then it will be especially as we approach the factory where we will employ 300 people that this will increase sharply again and finally for operations with 20 to 35 people per base and in the operations control center in Quebec,” specified Arnaud Thioulouse, general manager of the Quebec subsidiary.

“On development, we must also consider the forces deployed among our partners of 15 to 30 people per supplier of the main batches such as Delastek, P&WC, Thales Canada, Honeywell, etc. And the size of their teams is set to increase significantly now we are entering the phase of integration testing and detailed design, a phase which in an aeronautical development always mobilizes the most personnel,” he concluded.

-With the collaboration of Sylvain Larocque