By : Charles N Barnard

The Goodyear people told me that if I came to Akron, I might be able to hitch a ride in a blimp. The one they had in mind is named the Spirit of Akron. Although it is based in Ohio, it travels thousands of miles a year and is frequently seen off television, hovering over sports stadiums. It is more than 200 feet long, the largest airship flying in the United States today.

The Spirit of Akron is reflected in wet pavement outside its hanger at Wigfoot lake, near Akron, Ohio.

A few weeks later, I find myself standing in the blimp hanger with a bunch of the Goodyear guys, listening to them talk about airships. The hanger, at Wingfoot Lake, a few miles outside Akron, crouches like a huge Quonset hut on the rolling countryside. It has been the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company's blimp base since 1917.

Spirit, as they call it, is stowed at one end of the building, but before I get to see the blimp, I meet GP "Pat" Henry, a former US Navy pilot, Joe Hajcak, engineer and pilot, and Tom Riley, operations manager for all the Goodyear blimps. They are eager to tell me about their unique world. Did I realize that Goodyear has to decline a thousand requests annually for its blimps to appear at various events? Did I know that it takes a thousand cubic feet of helium to lift 30 kilograms of blimp? Would I ever have guessed that the illuminated sign of Spirit weights half a ton has and has 8,200 bulbs? "But, hey don't let us bury you with too much information," Tom Riley says finally. "We can't help it, you know. It's called 'airship bull.' You'll get used to it in a couple of days."

Goodyear’s the Spirit of Akron rests in its hanger, dwarfing its surroundings. It is the largest airship flying in the United States and the world’s biggest blimp.

The hangar is a maintenance facility with many capabilities - welding, sewing, painting, rigging, glazing and so on. "We could build to whole, new blimp right here if we had to," a young rigger tells me with pride. I believe him. There are parts of cannibalized blimps all over the place, and there are people who remember where each part came from. The most notorious of these fragments is the gondola of the blimp that came down in California after an antisubmarine patrol during Would War II - without any sign of its two-man crew. It is one of blimpdom's enduring mysteries. The L-8 had once been a Goodyear blimp; it was sold to the US Navy, then repurchased after the war. The fate of its officers remains unknown.

Eventually we take a walk to see the Spirit of Akron. A phrase out of history comes back to me at this movement. When the forty-niners headed west during the California gold rush, they shouted: "we're going to see the elephant?" They meant they were on their way to see something they believed would be new, strange and wonderful. I feel the same way.

When the last door is rolled open and I step into Spirit's space could that has been pulled down from the sky and tied to the floor. On TV screens, blimps look like they're only a few inches long, so an encounter with the real thing is a shock. I feel lilliputian as I walk around under the ship's six-story mass. It is humbling to be in the presence of something so much larger than life.

Blimps are hot. They have marquee names, make appearances, draw crowds. People scramble to get close to them, to touch them, to scrawl graffiti on them with lipsticks and felt-tip pens. It's true not just of Goodyear blimps but of a crowd of others as well, floating over everything from the Kentucky Derby to a frog-jumping contest. Blimps are showing up as trendy props in TV advertising, too. An actor bungee-jumps from one and scoops up a dab of salsa; a quarterback phones two blimp pilots flying over the stadium, to see if he left his truck lights on; a sweepstakes team arrives at a winner's front door with the big check while a blimp hangs in the sky.

Aviatrix Amelia Earhart (holding flask) presides at the 1929 blimp christening

Goodyear started flying the first of its airships in 1911. Over the years, it has dominated the American blimp business, but in recent years a brash new bunch has showed up emblazoned with all kinds of trademarks. What's it all about? Promotion, of course. Nothing promotes a spectacle better than a spectacle.

"Blimps bestow a certain cachet on the events they cover and on the companies they represent," says Michael Bolton, a blimp marketing man. "They make everything seem more important and more exciting by their very presence." A Goodyear pilot adds, "You've heard the saying that blimps make people smile and dogs bark. It's true. We're ambassadors of goodwill."

The bottom-line reality behind the blimp boom is not just brand-name exposure of TV. Blimp people offer the networks aerial photography at no cost. TV directors need those sparkling "beauty shots" of sports stadiums sunbathed by day and illuminated at night, and they pay for them with dutiful on-air acknowledgments.

Goodyear’s the Spirit of Akron

The value of those fleeting looks, calculated at TV's extraordinary advertising rates, is what keeps blimps in the air there days - even over domed stadiums. If Goodyear gets 45 to 90 seconds of national TV exposure during a World Series game or the Super Bowl, it's worth millions. These rewards are more than enough to justify the cost of maintaining three big blimps. In addition to the Spirit of Akron, Goodyear operates the Stars & Stripes, based in Florida, and the Eagle, based in California.

A notice posted in Tom Riley's office announces that Goodyear's blimps earned the equivalent of nearly $ 20 million in TV exposure in 1997. That's why three new leased blimps joined the Goodyear fleet this year. Two are flying in Europe, one in South America.

Visionaries have always seen a future for airships that goes, far beyond advertising, however. In South Africa, the Hamilton Airship Company has formulated plans for a luxury dirigible of near-Hindenburg proportions. It would carry 30 passengers across the Atlantic from Johannesburg to New York City, Donald Trump recently conceived a plan to ferry 160 high rollers a day to his casino in Atlantic City aboard a luxury airship. The exorbitant cost, not any lack of engineering feasibility, caused him to shelve the idea.

A company called Airship Management Services (AMS) is working with a company in Saudi Arabia to provide a blimp for surveillance during the hajj, the annual gathering of millions of Muslims in Mecca and Medina. AMS blimps have already helped with crowd management at the Los Angeles, Seoul and Atlanta Olympics - examples of what many believe will be a growing airship market: police work and border patrols.

A German company, Cargo Lifter AG, is planning to built a gigantic cargo-carrying airship capable of flying 130 kilometers per hour. When fully inflated, it will be longer than the Washington Monument is tall. It's aimed at the $ 9 billion-a-year market for transporting freight to places where planes can't land and for carrying cargo - turbines and power-generating equipment, for example - that is too bulky and heavy (up to 150 tons) for airplanes.

In the beginning, when only birds could fly, men who dreamed of breaking their earthbound shackles could not have conceived of cargo blimps and airship ferries. The Chinese claim they had a cigar-shaped envelope filled with hot air that few in 1306. In the late 18th century, the Montgolfier brothers turned the French court upside down with excitement when they demonstrated their first hot-air balloons. One of their craft lifted the first humans aloft, over Paris, in 1783. Soon, paying passengers were being taken for rides; one such adventurer was aboard for the first aerial crossing of the English Channel in 1785. The balloon went from Dover to Calais in two hours.

But those early aeronauts were at the mercy of the winds. Naturally they had some reservations about drifting uncontrollably across the sky, so they turned their attention to matters of steering and propulsion. Oars, propellers driven by pedal power, and flapping wings were all tried as means to direct the earliest airships. A three-horsepower steam engine was used for the first powered, man-carrying dirigible, in 1852. Eventually internal combustion engines became the power source of choice.

"Blimps," by definition, are non-rigid. "Zeppelins" are considered rigid because they have an interior frame. The word "dirigible" is used to refer to either type of airship.

Until World War I came along, airships remained novelties. The British recognized that blimps were ideal for submarine reconnaissance because they could remain stationary and thereby enable observers on board to look deep into the water. The Germans, supplied by the airship company founded in 1898 by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, used dirigibles to attack Britain; it was history's first large-scale bombing of civilians from the air. More than a hundred "Zepps," some more than 200 meters long, were so deployed, sometimes flying higher than 7,600 meters, well about the range of the pursuit planes of the day. London was bombed 55 times between 1915 and 1918, and hundred died. But some zeppelins were shot down, too, going to earth in fiery, hydrogen-fueled plunges.

Airships went on to see their brightest and darkest days in the 1920s and 1930s. The Zeppelin company returned to production in 1928 with the passenger ship Graf Zeppelin, and its success seemed to promise a golden age. But then three giant US Navy dirigibles, including the Akron and the Macon, built by Goodyear, fell victim to storms and crashes that killed 59 people. Two more death occurred as the result of a handling mishap in 1932. The Akron was attempting to moor at a camp in California when three crewmen, clinging to their handling lines, were suddenly borne aloft. One held on and was saved; the others fell to their deaths. Next came the spectacular Hindenburg disaster in 1937, which, thanks to film coverage and a horrified eyewitness radio report, etched in the public mind an image of tragedy that ended the era of intercontinental airship flight.

In World War II, Goodyear built more than 300 antisubmarine blimps of various sizes for the Navy. Those craft operated from more than 50 bases, patrolled thousands of miles of coastline, flew 55,900 missions and never lost one of the 89,000 merchant and troop ships they escorted. Only one blimp was lost to enemy action. In 1943, off Florida, the K-74 was shot down while making a bombing run on a surfaced German sub. Nine crewmen survived in the water until they were rescued by a destroyer. The tenth man, unable to keep pace with the others, was picked off by a shark.

The 30-year partnership between Goodyear and the Navy came to an end in the early 1960s when the latter’s blimp fleet was decommissioned. Lighter-than-air advocates had lost a battle within a Navy that had come to be dominated by proponents of aircraft carriers. Blimp safety was still regarded skeptically, anyway; blimp supporters were referred to disparagingly as "Helium Heads".

These days blimps may be hot in terms of their visibility, but they are not as numerous as TV exposure makes them seem. Only about two dozen airships are currently flying in the entire world. Three are owned by Goodyear. Three more belong to a German company, WDL, and fly only in Europe. Another German airship, the Zeppelin NT, built by the successor to the original Zeppelin company in Friedrichshafen, home of the Zepelin Museum, made its first flight last year. Back in the united States, AMS operates the Fuji blimp, which has been flying the colors of the Japanese film firm since 1984.

The other 16 blimps constitute the world’s largest proprietary fleet of airships. All have been built since 1989 by the American Blimp Corporation (ABC) in Hillsboro, Oregon. They come in two basic sizes and are leased to clients by a subsidiary of ABC, the Lightship Group in Orlando, Florida, If you have the feeling that blimps are everywhere, these are the guys to blame. Even competitors acknowledge that Lightships, as these blimps are known, have revolutionized the business. Most are relatively small, 40 meters long, and inexpensive to rent, at about $ 175,000 a month. (If you want to buy one outright, it will cost you a little less than $ 2 million). They are visually arresting, especially at night, when interior illumination of the translucent envelope (by means of two 1,000-watt mercury vapor bulbs) creates a startling, lantern-in-the-sky effect. Lightships have a long and ever-changing client list. American Express, Mazda, Brut and even Goodyear have leased them, and current clients with long-term contracts include Budweiser, Blockbster Video and MetLife. The Lightship Group is now making plans to revive the blimp tourist market. It anticipates having 40 airships that will fly over such sites as the Taj Mahal, the Masai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya and perhaps eventually the Grand Canyon.

In its Oregon factory, ABC employs 45 people and has the capacity to build five new blimps a year. It concentrates on variations of its two basic models the original small Lightship and a larger, nine-passenger version of which two are now flying (one for Sanyo, one for Budweiser). A 40-passenger model, called the Millennium, may be ready to fly around the world in the year 2000. This is a feat that was first accomplished by the Graf Zeppelin seven decades ago.

Everyone these days seems to want a ride in a blimp. Operators are inundated with requests by hone, fax and E-mail. Alas, the ships are so few in number, so tightly scheduled and so limited in payload that only a tiny fraction of the requests can be granted. Happily, mine is among them.

Two loud horn, blasts within the Wingfoot hangar summon the ground crew. The Spirit of Akron is about to be moved out to fly-with me aboard. As the airship, attached to a rolling pyramid mast, is pulled from the hangar, it slips slowly past me, momentarily blotting out the sun. Its two engines make a soft turbine whine. After Spirit is freed from the mast, eight crewmen hold the ship down by two nose lines while others grip a handrail around the gondola. There is a wind off the nearby lake; the men are tugging, leaning against the pull of the ropes. I move under the blimp, to the cabin door.

There’s a hand on my shoulder and a voice in my ear. "Get aboard" in the copilot seat”. I climb in. The door clicks shut be hind me. I turn forward and slip into the big right-side chair. A bewildering array of radios and instruments blink a hundred tiny lights. Pat Henry, who has been flying blimps for 38 years, nods hello over the engine noise and points to a headset to put on. A curved windshield and dual controls are in front of me. On the ground, Spirit’s crew chief if holding a wind sock and giving Pat a thumbs-up : Go ! The nose line are cast off, ground crewmen dash away, Pat throttles on power.

We move forward for a few seconds, gathering speed, then rotate to what seems an extraordinary angle of climb. The nose lines, cast free, drift in the wind, two parallel white ropes pointing to earth like a dangling trapeze. We reach 1,000 feet in less than a minute and level off. Engine noise tunes down. The world and the horizon return in the windshield : lake on the right, farmland beyond, the tall buildings of Akron on the horizon.

As we fly, making small talk on the headphones, Spirit pitches mildly, nose up, nose down, all its movements gentle and slow. The ground slips by at about 55 kilometers per hour.

We’re just taking a tittle spin, but when Spirit goes on the road it is accompanied by a 12-meter tractor trailer, a bus and a van. A Goodyear team typically consists of 20 people : 15 ground crew (a blimp, unlike an airplane, is unable to take off or land without its ground crew), four pilots and one public-relations person. All but the two working pilots travel in the support vehicles.

Pat’s voice grumbles into my earphones. "Take it", he says, flipping a toggle switch at the top of this control column, and now I am flying the Goodyear blimp ~

I have been watching pat work big forward-and-back movements on the control column forward to lower the nose, back to lift it. It looks easy but it isn’t.

Oops, there she goes on me, nose climbing, bring ‘er down, bring ‘er down ! I push forward on the control column but she’s still climbing, going way too far. I’ve lost the horizon just blue sky in the windshield. Pat must think I’m a fool, but I don’t have time to look at him. Now she’s going down.

It isn’t just the up-and-down motion that has to be controlled; there is also some roll. "See that short rope that hangs down between the nose lines?" Pat says, pointing 15 meters ahead. "Try and keep it between the other two."

Part of my brain tries to picture what is happening: a 10-ton-rubber bag, more than 60 meters long, filled with a quarter-million cubic feet of gas, is moving through the sky like a loose balloon, no wings, no big power, no speed, a "sail area" of more than half an acre to catch every gust that comes along. I thought I would be able to feel all of this through my hands on the controls, the way I can when I fly a small plane. No such luck.

When Pat takes over again he gives me a wide, sidelong smile that seems to say: See what I mean about a blimp? It's unlike any other kind of flying.

We're heading back to the barn as quickly as possible. A windstorm is predicted from the west; the first guests are already arriving. Below are the giant hangar, the pyramid mast and several acres of grassy field. The ground crew is arrayed to receive us, 15 people looking very small, the chief holding up his fluttering wind sock. Landing a blimp is tricky even without a wind. Pat is pushing Spirit's nose down to earth with engine power now. The two long mooring lines sweep around in wild arcs as eight men try to grab them, rushing back and forth like soccer players, their arms all reaching up. Then..whoa there!...nothing!

A wind gust off the lake has caught us, and blimp is being pushed sideways. The ropes are sailing away and the ground crew is running after them, hands raised, fingers grasping. Cardinal rule for the men who grab the lines to bring a blimp back to earth: if something goes wrong, let go! Never allow the ship to pick you up. Another go-around and this time we land as softly as an elevator reaching the ground floor. I hear thumps as crewmen toss ballast bags aboard to help keep us down. The gondola door clicks open. My ride on the Spirit is over.

I have been to see the elephant.

About the Author: Charles N Barnard was a mere lad aboard an ocean liner in 1928 when he looked up and saw the Graf Zeppelin on its maiden transatlantic voyage.

This article is reproduced from SPAN.