Up, Up and Away to Save the Elephants

Up, Up and Away to Save the Elephants

By M.J. McAteer

Poet John Donne once called the elephant “the only harmless great thing.” Sadly, the same cannot be said for humans. In 2009, almost 110,000 African elephants roamed the plains of Tanzania, one of the largest remaining repositories of these magnificent animals left in the world. By 2014, 60 percent were dead, slaughtered for their tusks by poachers wielding machine guns and machetes. The reason: Asia’s rapacious appetite for illegal ivory.

Skipper Darlington, founder of AfricaASAP

The disruption of criminal networks trafficking in ivory will be essential to stopping this carnage, and some high-profile arrests have been made. But as long as demand continues unabated, the killing will, too, until more effective means of monitoring the elephants’ vast habitats can be deployed.

That’s where Skipper Darlington comes in. He wants to put an eye in the sky to watch over Africa’s imperiled pachyderms and other at-risk animals.

“It struck me that folks were using the wrong tool to combat poaching,” said Darlington, a Marshall native. “What’s needed is a craft that can stay up in the air for days or weeks and equipment to survey night and day. Only an airship can do that.”

You just can’t rent an airship, so Darlington, with a background in aviation, founded AfricaASAP to get one built.

Now a resident of Front Royal, he’s optimistic AfricaASAP can raise the $5 million to begin airship construction sometime next year. Deployment is yet to be determined, but a leading possibility is an area between Botswana and Victoria Falls on the Zambia and Zimbabwe border.

Once built, the organization’s unmanned airship will be remarkably thrifty to operate--about $30 an hour.

The dirigible can stay aloft for weeks, powered with onboard solar and fuel cells, while traveling as fast as 60 mph. It can monitor an area the size of West Virginia every 24 hours or hover in place for days on end, while transmitting data back to a land base as distant as 180 miles.

Critically, AfricaASAP’s airship will fly high enough to be out of range of the poachers’ AK47s, while carrying ultra-long-range cameras so powerful that in a sample video, it’s possible to see a ponytail on a woman on the ground three miles away.

John Waugh of Delaplane is an expert advisor to AfricaASAP. The environmentalist has twice addressed the U.N. General Assembly on issues of biodiversity and conflict.

He calls curbing poaching “just the tip of the iceberg” of what airship could do. It’s the ideal platform to hang sensors and monitors to gather data on issues critical to developing countries such as land use and water yields. An airship also could help provide benefits to isolated human communities, perhaps as wireless service.

“Nature doesn’t stop at the boundaries of national parks,” Waugh said. “You’ve got to do a lot of coalition building.” And not just cross-border, but worldwide.

“It’s almost impossible to ship wild animals [and parts] without official help,” Darlington says, citing China’s “wet” markets where laws against illegal wildlife trafficking go largely unenforced. If people only understood the slaughter on the savannas of Africa is not just a tragedy for one species, but a threat to all species, demand for illegal ivory might diminish.

“If you protect the elephants, you protect everything,” Darlington said. With his airship, he hopes to start doing just that.