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At a Glance
- The company inaugurated flights of its Goodyear-branded blimps for promotional purposes in 1925.
- Goodyear has flown 31 different promotional Blimps over 100 years.
- The New Technology Blimps are made by Zeppelin and they aren't really blimps.
Goodyear’s iconic Blimp has been cruising the skies above major sporting events for 100 years, and it is covering those events better than ever thanks to impressive advances in design and technology. This may seem surprising, considering that the football-shaped lighter-than-air aircraft have looked pretty similar this whole time, while conventional airplanes have progressed from fabric-covered biplanes to carbon fiber 787s during the same period.
Goodyear founded its Aeronautics Department in 1910 when the term “aeronautics” was leading-edge. The aim was to diversify from rubber-infused fabric containing air to cushion cars’ wheels to rubber-infused fabric containing helium for lifting vehicles entirely clear of the ground.
In 1917, Goodyear built an airship factory on Wingfoot Lake in Suffield, Ohio, and nearly all of the company’s blimps have been built there since. It remains the primary base of Goodyear Airship operating to this day. The other bases are in Carson, California, Pompano Beach, Florida, and Essen, Germany
The company inaugurated flights of its Goodyear-branded blimps for promotional purposes in 1925 and it has flown 31 of them during the last hundred years. The company has built 325 blimps, with most of those serving as submarine spotters for the US Navy during World War II.
The first promotional Goodyear Blimp was named Pilgrim, and it pioneered the use of helium rather than the hydrogen favored by Germany’s Zeppelin company. It also established the tradition of naming Blimps after America's Cup-winning yachts. The 86,000 cubic-foot Pilgram was joined in 1928 by the 96,000 cu.-ft. Puritan, and in 1930 by the Defender, which had 112,000 cubic feet of helium in its envelope. Defender innovated Goodyear’s light-up sign board, using ten 6x4-foot aluminum-framed panels containing neon tubes to send messages to viewers on the ground.
The Blimp Goes to War
In 1934, Goodyear launched Enterprise, with two internal ballonets containing a combined 123,000 cu.-ft. of helium, establishing the template for Goodyear Blimps for the next two decades. When the US entered WWII in 1941, the Goodyear Blimp Resolute was the only airship on the west coast.
While the term “privateer” normally recalls notions of Queen Elizabeth’s 16-century Sea Dogs, sailing with the crown’s authorization as legalized pirates against Spanish ships, Resolute also flew as a privateer military ship during the early months of WWII, before it was commandeered by the War Department and its crew drafted into the Navy for official service. The Navy reports that none of the 89,000 ships escorted by Blimps were sunk by enemy submarines because the Blimps could easily spot the subs from above.
After the war, Goodyear repurchased five blimps from the Navy, branding them Ranger, Volunteer, Enterprise, Mayflower, and Puritan. They were mounted with new sign panels that used arrays of 182 incandescent bulbs in place of the neon tubes of the previous Neon-O-Gram signs.
Finally, on Jan. 1st, 1955, the Goodyear Blimp took its familiar place in the skies above a major sporting event, providing live aerial video of the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl football game. Goodyear began a switch from old-style air-cooled radial aircraft engines to more modern 175-horsepower inline engines in 1959, with the new GZ-19 blimp, named Mayflower
The 100-foot-long Skytacular lighted sign arrived in 1966 with its colored lights that let the Blimp display animations for the first time. This was just in time for the Blimp Columbia to cover the first Super Bowl in Jan. 1967.
The New Standard
The big change came in 1969, with the arrival of the GZ-20 blimp America, a design that would serve the company for nearly a half-century, as the last GZ-20 retired from service in 2017. This design stretched 192 feet long and the envelope held nearly 203,000 cubic feet of helium. It carried the Super Skytacular sign, which doubled the height of the Skytacular. It carried a pair of more powerful 210-hp Continental engines.
In 1972, Europa joined America, flying the Goodyear flag over European sporting events for the first time. Europa provided coverage of the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Easter Mass at the Vatican, and the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium.
It is hard to imagine a major corporation participating in such a thing today, but in 1977, Goodyear provided a blimp for the John Frankenheimer film “Black Sunday,” in which terrorists use the blimp to attack the crowd during a Super Bowl. Frankenheimer reportedly leveraged the relationship he developed with Goodyear’s PR department during the filming of the racing movie, “Grand Prix” to accomplish the company’s participation. In any case, it made for a dramatic and memorable view of the Blimp.
For the 1980 World Series, Goodyear flew blimps over both Philadelphia and Kansas City, covering the series in both locations for the first time. Four years later, two blimps worked the same event for the first time, covering the Los Angeles Olympics.
Technical Dead End
In 1986, Goodyear went down a technical dead end with the Spirit of Akron, the sole GZ-22-type Blimp built. It had advanced features like thrust vectoring turboprop engines. The challenge of maintaining this design led it to be a one-off model that was retired after only 12 years. The company converted the Blimp’s sign from incandescent bulbs to LEDs in 1996, with the Super Skytacular 2 sign. Its 3,780 three-color LED boards produced 32,768 color combinations. Importantly, 1,036 of the LED boards were equipped with 36 extra high-intensity LEDs, making the sign bright enough to be read in daylight for the first time.
This was important, as the Goodyear Blimp has been able to provide a public service function during natural disasters. During the 1989 World Series game in Oakland, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck San Francisco, and Goodyear pivoted from covering the game to covering the disaster unfolding in the city below. The crew of Columbia was able to assist emergency responders by providing them with aerial views of the disaster and directing their response to where help was needed most.
Following Hurricane Andrew in South Florida, the Blimp Stars & Stripes deployed from its Pompano Beach base to fly over the disaster zone, using its sign board to send critical relief information to residents on the ground, directing them to Red Cross supply stations.
1987 saw the sale of Goodyear Aerospace Corporation to Loral Corp., taking with it the rights to the GZ-20 design. So in 2011, Goodyear announced that it would buy new blimps from Zeppelin. The airships of the final generation of GZ-20 Blimps that launched in the early 2000s were the Spirit of Goodyear, the Spirit of America, and the Spirit of Innovation.
When is a Blimp Not a Blimp?
Goodyear and Zeppelin launched the first New Technology Blimp, Wingfoot One, in 2014. It has been followed with the similarly generically named Wingfoot Two in 2016 and Wingfoot Three in 2018. These Blimps cover North America for the company, while a fourth one flies from Zeppelin’s Friedrichshafen, Germany base to European events.
The most important thing about the NT Blimps is that, well, they aren’t blimps. The definition of the term refers to a semi-rigid airship and the NT blimps have a rigid internal carbon fiber and aluminum structure. The NT Blimps are longer, slimmer, faster, and more maneuverable than the GZ-20 Blimps.
Their engines also swivel, providing thrust vectoring that lets the NT Blimps hover in place. Hovering wasn’t possible with the NT Blimps, which instead orbited sports stadiums while covering games, explained airship maintenance manager Jim Crone.
They have a digital glass cockpit of computer displays that makes them easy to fly, while the GZ-20s still used exhausting manual controls with rudder pedals and hand crank. Previously a shift piloting a Blimp would leave the pilots utterly worn out, Crone said.
The new Blimps have the latest navigation technology and high-definition video technology for their live broadcasts. Their displays can now show actual video, though the resolution still falls below that of say, an in-stadium Jumbotron. Their gondolas are also larger and more comfortable than before.
While these machines are easier to fly, maintenance is more challenging, as the engine nacelles that permit thrust vectoring are mounted high in the air, out of technicians’ easy reach, reports Crone. However, internal inspection and repair work inside the helium envelope is easier now, thanks to the internal structure that makes it easier to the top of the Blimp. For a better appreciation of how the Blimp has changed over the last century, click through our photo gallery to see the Blimps from the first to the most recent.
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