Budweiser Blimp / Airship

[sadaist]

Always fucking loved seeing blimps cruising around. The week leading up to Super Bowl XXXII in Jan 1998, San Diego...we had 4 of those fuckers floating around town. Budweiser, Goodyear, Fuji, & MetLife. Goodyear was by far the biggest. Fuji was the smallest.

I knew where these guys were landing and mooring in between flights and decided why not cruise up there & see if I could get a closer look. The Bud 1 Airship was parked out there. I saw a Budweiser work truck with a guy there and I went up & asked if it would be alright if I walked over to the blimp for a closer look. He said sure. Go ahead. Enjoy!

So I got to walk right up to the big fucker, and the couple guys working on it even asked if I would like to step inside, "FUCK YES I DO!" How fucking cool of these guys. (This was before 9/11 and people used to let you do cool shit like this if you asked nicely)

Anyways, took some pics and just found them this weekend. Thought I'd share as airships are fucking cool & maybe someone will like to see the inside of one.

The pilot chair is like a wheelchair with a large wheel on each side. This is how they steer. Weird, yet kinda cool. I asked what they do for bathroom & they take jugs up with them. Interior was tiny, but embroidered with the Budweiser name & logo.

2 pilot seats, 4 captain chairs behind, and a bench in the far rear. Can't imagine it being very comfortable packed with 8 people though. Oh, and the cabin has a sunroof thing with a thick clear plastic window where you can look up into the actual blimp part. Damn if I can't find a pic of that part though.

[sadaist]

[sadaist]

[Nitro Express]

When I lived in New York City some old timer told us the story of him playing in the yard in Hoboken, New Jersey and the Hindenburg flew right over his house. He said it was huge and those big engines just roared. That would have been something to see when you were a kid going over your house.

[LoungeMachine]

When I lived in New York City some old timer told us the story of him playing in the yard in Hoboken, New Jersey and the Hindenburg flew right over his house. He said it was huge and those big engines just roared. That would have been something to see when you were a kid going over your house.

How did it handle?

[fryingdutchman]

How did it handle?

Sluggish.....like a wet sponge.

[Seshmeister]

Light, tasteless and full of gas.

What gave Budweiser the idea to use a blimp to promote their beer...?

[sadaist]

Light, tasteless and full of gas.

What gave Budweiser the idea to use a blimp to promote their beer...?

HAHA. Never thought of it that way. But if you notice, the nose of the blimp is a bottle cap.


Side note, the big white eyeball thing outside the cabin on the front is the camera they use for the TV shots of the football game. I bet that thing cost almost as much as the blimp itself.

[VAiN]

The GoodYear blimp down here lives in a hanger about 10 min from my place... It's cool to drive my and see it actual size. They're fucking HUGE!!

[sadaist]

The GoodYear blimp down here lives in a hanger about 10 min from my place... It's cool to drive my and see it actual size. They're fucking HUGE!!

Yeah...I could see the GoodYear one just taking off a couple miles away at the other end of the giant field while we were looking at the Budweiser one. Much much bigger. Plus the side lights up. But I am glad I got to see the BUD 1. It seems to be the one at all the big football events. The size is breathtaking when you get up close. Hard to describe. MASSIVE. Pics don't really do it justice.

[Unchainme]

The GoodYear blimp down here lives in a hanger about 10 min from my place... It's cool to drive my and see it actual size. They're fucking HUGE!!

Goodyear Hangar in NEOhio is just a few miles away from where I go to school. I see that damn thing a lot during the summer.

[sadaist]

Goodyear Hangar in NEOhio is just a few miles away from where I go to school. I see that damn thing a lot during the summer.

The engines have a very distinctive sound/hum. I was sleeping in on a Saturday when I lived near the beach one year & heard it out the window. Knew instantly what it was. Looked out & sho nuff....thar she blows!

[chefcraig]

The engines have a very distinctive sound/hum. I was sleeping in on a Saturday when I lived near the beach one year & heard it out the window. Knew instantly what it was. Looked out & sho nuff....thar she blows!

That is going to change. The new ships will have three, much more quiet motors instead of two huge ones.

Goodyear to replace fleet of blimps with bigger zeppelins

The tire giant will work with a German firm to build three rigid-structure airships. Starting in 2014, Goodyear will begin to swap out the blimps, including the one based in Carson.

By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times/Sun Sentinel

May 18, 2011


The 33-acre grassy airfield in Carson 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 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's 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 commercials 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."

The blimp in Carson, dubbed Spirit of America, flies about four tours for passengers every day, typically for Goodyear clients who clamber inside the six-passenger gondola. The 45-minute late-afternoon tours are not available to the public; they're invitation-only and free of charge to friends and customers of the company as well as charity auctions.

While some neighbors find it noisy at times, the blimp is a popular sight in the South Bay, including to motorists passing by the airfield, which is just east of the 405 Freeway.

When the announcement came that Goodyear was replacing the fleet, the company's Facebook page was barraged with well-wishing send-offs. One teenage girl posted a message asking for assurance that the outgoing fleet be handled with care and to "not destroy the blimps."

In 1991, people sent in get-well cards to the blimp after it collided with a remote-controlled model airplane and suffered a 1-square-foot gash.

And riding on the blimp is close-up and personal.

"If you want a nice view of what's below, this is the way to go," said Victor Gongora, a 45-year-old tire dealer from Santa Clarita. "A plane goes too fast. It's hard to see where you're at when you're traveling that fast."

The company got into the blimp business in 1910. During World War II, the U.S. Navy maintained a fleet of more than 150 blimps built by Goodyear, and many were used to patrol the California coast. Some were even outfitted with .50-caliber machine guns.

The region's blimp heritage still is visible at the two hangars at the defunct Tustin Marine Corps Air Station. The hangars are currently used to perform maintenance on the Goodyear blimp.

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.

But the deal between the two companies took a hit after the Hindenburg burst into flames in 1937 in front of news cameras while mooring at Lakehurst, N.J., deflating the chances for lighter-than-air ships to become a popular mode of travel.

Goodyear blimps are filled with nonflammable helium, not hydrogen like the Hindenburg. The company has been operating out of Carson since 1968 and in that time has never had a major accident.

"Nobody's afraid of the Goodyear blimp," Conrad said before a recent flight over the South Bay. "People smile when they see it go by. You know, I didn't get that kind of reaction when I flew helicopters."

[sadaist]

Damn Chef....we're gonna have zeppelins floating around? more than 50 feet longer than our current largest blimps too. Fucking crazy! Can't wait to see one, except I think I will always picture the Hindenburg on fire every time I see one.

Still though...these new ones will still only be about 1/3 the size of the old MONSTERS

*my buddy used to bring two GIANT joints with him when we would camp at the CO River for Spring Breaks. The Graf Zeppelin & the Hindenburg. Yep.....they always went down in flames.


A size comparison of the Hindenburg with a 747
and the Titanic. The Titanic is only 78 feet longer
than the Hindenburg at 882 feet long.

[sadaist]

Sick....yet just plain awesome!





Graf Zeppelin