“It’s the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day.”
“Goodyear?”
“No. The worst.”
I fly a lot. It’s part of the gig. I’m also a deeply curious person, and that curiosity has often led me on deep dives into aviation accidents—frequently the night before or the day of a scheduled flight. Don’t ask me why, but reading about inescapable death doesn’t trigger anxiety in me the way it can in others. Chalk it up to a childhood of watching educational disaster porn on television, but if there’s a way for a plane to fall out of the sky, I’ve probably read the NTSB report describing it in full. What can I say? I find closure satisfying.
But as a millennial who grew up in the peak CD-ROM era, I have a very weird relationship with blimps. What could one possibly have to do with the other? If you also happened to live through the 1990s, you may have had a copy of Microsoft’s Encarta. Taking advantage of the greater media space offered by the format, CD-ROM editions contained video (gasp!) of select entries. Among the small number of included clips was Hindenburg disaster footage. I can’t tell you how many times I watched that loop as a kid. I’m no doubt a contributor to the zeitgeist that helped propel “Oh, the huge manatee!” to peak memedom.
But do I have a flaming zeppelin on my mind as I’m boarding Goodyear‘s “Wingfoot Two”? No. It’s that stupid line above from The Naked Gun. And I’m chuckling at it because I’m genuinely giddy about getting to ride in an airship.
Despite what you may have heard about this business, the vast majority of my time airborne is spent deep in steerage. The Wingfoot Two seats seven; there ain’t a bad seat in this house.
The “ship” part of airship is something to be taken seriously. If you think about it, a blimp is really just a submarine turned conceptually inside-out. The skin keeps the helium in rather than keeping water out (though, strictly speaking, it does that too), but the general principles of buoyancy still apply. To study the wind is to study fluid dynamics.
And since it behaves like a seafaring craft, it’s treated like one. Boarding the Wingfoot Two is like boarding a ferry that is already underway. The gangway ladder is fitted with wheels so that it can move with the blimp as it pivots about its mooring cable. The blimp may be drifting at anything from a gentle amble to a spirited jog, and that pace can change in an instant. Fall down in front of the ladder, and you risk being run over by a 20,000-pound party favor.
Moreover, because the Wingfoot Two is nothing more than a giant gas bag with propellers on it, its natural inclination (so to speak) is to go up. Because the Goodyear team is trying to run through a packed schedule of passenger rides, they never truly “land” the thing in between trips. The passengers themselves serve as ballast, and new riders board before the previous ride’s passengers disembark, to err on the side of keeping it too heavy. All the while, the pilots are effectively flying the ship into the ground just to keep it from floating away.
With the last of the previous ride’s passengers off and the boarding hatch shut (window open for comfort; there’s no AC onboard), there’s a quick safety briefing, and then we’re cleared for takeoff. The ground crew casts us off and the ship noses up immediately as the pilot rotates the props to send us vertical.
A plane glides. A helicopter beats the air beneath it into submission. A blimp… floats. It’s eerie; you feel every thermal and wind gust. The whole thing occasionally drifts sideways on a whim. But it’s gentle—muted by the sheer size of the helium bladder holding you up. We’re cleared to move about the cabin at our “cruising altitude” of 1,000 feet, but we’re encouraged to hold onto the various rails and purchases until we find our “sea legs.”
Since the Wingfoot Two’s props are only there to provide thrust and not lift, they’re not terribly noisy. One of the crew members stands facing us throughout the flight to present the standard “tour” and never once needs to raise his voice, even with the windows open to provide ventilation. It’s not silent, but it’s not intrusive either.
It’s no stretch to imagine that this was once the peak of luxury travel. The ride is smooth and the views are spectacular. But even a gentle gust reminds you just how much you’re at the mercy of the weather. Muted though the effects may be, there’s no getting around the sheer physics of it. Wingfoot Two may be shaped like a torpedo, but it might as well be a sail; it’s about as aerodynamic as anything else originally conceived over a century ago—which is to say, not very.
The low altitude and surface-street pace tend to draw attention to the big airship too. At both lift-off and landing, cars stop along the side of the airfield and curious onlookers emerge carrying phones and cameras. That’s a sign that Wingfoot Two is doing its job. The first Goodyear blimp was a vanity project conceived as an airborne yacht for landlocked gentry.
Goodyear isn’t selling these to Sam Altman as pleasure cruisers in 2026, but they still perform the same basic function they did more than a century ago—spreading the word. Goodyear calls these “exposure” flights. In this case, the company wants to bring attention to the new flagship store it just opened off Woodward Avenue in Detroit proper. We can’t quite see the skyline through the haze, but it’s out there, somewhere to the southwest.
The open windows make for great photo opportunities, but despite what appears to be a leisurely pace, we’re reminded that the blimp is cruising along at 40 knots—about 46 miles per hour. That’s quick enough to snatch a phone out of your hands if you’re not being careful, and our flight from Oakland County Airport to the Woodward corridor takes us over quite a few of Michigan’s prime lake communities. One mistake and “blooper” simply becomes “bloop.”
Forty-six mph may not sound like much, and even compared to some of the more affordable general aviation options, it isn’t. Some consumer-grade drones can run circles around Goodyear’s airships. If getting there quickly is your priority, even a car may be better, though our crew tells us that they could make the run from the northern Detroit ‘burbs to the company’s Airdock in Akron, Ohio, in about three hours at their typical cruising speed. You could nearly double their pace in a car, but the ships get to take a shortcut over Ontario and Lake Erie, while the automobile has to take the long way around via Toledo.
Huh. That sounds like the makings of an interesting race. How ’bout it, Goodyear? First one there gets bragging rights and a victory lap around the test track? I’ll bring the car; you bring the ship.
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