The 33-acre grassy airfield in Carson, Calif., doesn’t appear much bigger than a postage stamp when pilot Jon Conrad begins steering the 12,840-pound Goodyear blimp in for a landing.
“It looks a little different from this vantage point, doesn’t it?” he says with a chuckle. “That doesn’t seem like much room when you’re landing an aircraft that’s comparable to a Boeing 747.”
The tight squeeze will get a little tighter in the coming years with this month’s announcement that Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. will once again replace its helium-filled fleet of three silver, blue and gold blimps with bigger, faster ones.
The Akron, Ohio, company said it would work with German manufacturer ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik to build three airships costing about $21 million each. Beginning in 2014, Goodyear will begin to swap out the three blimps, now based in Akron, Pompano Beach, Fla., and Carson.
The plump Goodyear blimps have been a regular sight in Southern California since before World War II, when the U.S. Navy used them to keep an eye on the Pacific coast in case of an attack. Rarely is there a high-profile occasion in the region without it buzzing overhead.
“Some people would say that it isn’t a complete Rose Bowl event without the Goodyear blimp,” Pasadena, Calif., Mayor Bill Bogaard said. “It floats across the sky in a way that everybody enjoys. And it’s slow enough that when you call your friends and family to take a look, it will still be there.”
But if the current Goodyear blimp grabs attention, the new airships will be even more eye-catching.
At 246 feet, the replacements are 54 feet longer and can hit a top speed of 73 mph — compared with the current airships’ 54 mph. They will have three propeller engines attached above the gondola, unlike the two noisy engines that currently flank the rear of the gondola.
Because they will have rigid skeletons, in this case made of aluminum and carbon-fiber, they will technically be zeppelins and not blimps. But rest easy; the airship will still be called the Goodyear blimp. It will carry 12 passengers — six more than today’s blimps — and include state-of-the art avionics and flight control systems.
They’re typically replaced every 10 to 15 years. The current blimp in Carson was built in 2001.
“It’s like I’m getting a new car,” said Conrad, 41, a onetime helicopter crop duster from Nebraska who is now Goodyear’s head pilot at the airfield. “I’ll enjoy showing it off.”
Showing off the airship is the whole point.
Take, for example, the Super Bowl. Goodyear packs in a television cameraman and provides aerial shots — as long as ground crews snap some footage of the blimp during the game.
While companies are shelling out as much as $3 million for a 30-second commercial, Goodyear gets what amounts to a handful of 10-second spots just by providing airborne footage, said Kelly O’Keefe, a marketing professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The company wouldn’t say how much it benefits from the enterprise but said that the dollar value of the broadcast attention it gets over the course of year far outweighs the costs of operations. Goodyear said the advertising value is in the “millions of dollars.”
“They get exposure at every highly trafficked public event,” O’Keefe said. “That’s a lot of value from an advertising perspective.”
It’s been so successful that other companies — Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. and Fujifilm Holdings Corp. among them — have slapped their names on the side of blimps, Kelly said.
“But Goodyear’s blimps are iconic,” he said. “It’s gotten to the point that if you just saw a silhouette of a blimp in the sky, you’d assume it belonged to Goodyear.”
Goodyear and ZLT Zeppelin teams will build the new airships at Goodyear facilities near Akron. The two companies previously built massive airships designed to carry hundreds of people from continent to continent, starting in 1924. The early zeppelins were four times as long as the current blimps.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
