Doc
Appearances
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
It's one of the most challenging aircraft that I've ever learned to fly. No two takeoffs and landings are the same. So even if the conditions are relatively stable all day, just flying the air, the challenge of flying the airship is fun for me because it keeps you on your toes and teaches you something new every once in a while.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
It's the only way to see the world, because you're 1,000 feet above the ground. You're going about 40 or 45 miles an hour. You can wave out the window, and people can see you and wave back. I mean, it's pretty cool.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
I've literally been from New York to LA in an airship at one time or another, so you see some crazy stuff along the way. I think it's up somewhere in Michigan where you're out in the middle of cornfields for 25 miles and all of a sudden there's a train caboose. There's no railroad tracks, there's no roads, there's nothing. And you're like, how in the world?
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
Maybe 100 years ago there was a train track and the thing stopped and now it's there. I don't know. You see things like that when you're flying across the high desert.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
you're 100 miles from nowhere and you see some tiny little house with a truck sitting there and you're like, well, where did this person come from and what do they do and how do they go to work or how do they even get water here for that matter? Like it's just, yeah, so you do see some pretty crazy and unique things around.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
We do have a bathroom for emergency uses, but if you take a peek inside, take a picture, we call it the loo with the view.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
In 2016, we retired the last of the old-style fleet of airships, the GZ-20 airship. And the flight controls in that airship were exactly the same as the 1925 Pilgrim.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
We really took a jump from 1925 to 2020 technology when we went to these new airships. So the first one came out in 2014. We had a second one in 16, and that's when we retired the last of the old ones, started training the third crew. And then the third one came out in 2018 and then everybody had one.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
So the crazy part about this is that transition for the pilots, for the ground crew, for the ground support, the maintenance standpoint, everything was just so different in this one that we literally started over. And we leaned on a little bit our history to say, well, we've been doing this for a long time and we kind of know.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
and we didn't know for example you figure that solid ballast is what holds us on the ground right we had 25 pound shop bags now we have to make kilograms we'll just make them 22 and a half pounds and they're 10 kilograms each and that should be fine no problem wrong because the ballast compartments on these were made for lead because that's what they use in europe and they're too small to fit our 25 pound shop bags so we we couldn't even get dead weight right we had to start over
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
And here, because of the EPA rules and things like that, we had to find a safe form of doing that that wasn't stupidly expensive. So we were able to tackle these problems one at a time, but I mean, literally the helium inside is the only thing consistent between this blimp and the old school GZ style airships.
Flightless Bird
Goodyear Blimp
I always joke with people that flying the old GZ style airships was like driving like a late 1960s muscle car. And then hopping into this thing is like hopping into a 2020 BMW.