Can anyone here fly a blimp?...Sort of!
Posted: Monday, December 17, 2007 6:31 PM by Jen Brown
(From Jenna Wolfe, TODAY correspondent)
To say I didn’t know much about blimps before last week when I was assigned a story on the GOODYEAR blimp down in Florida, is an understatement. I honestly thought I was going to be able to sit in the big belly, bouncing around in that thing like a kernel of corn. So you can imagine my surprise when we pulled up and I saw the little gondola attached to the bottom of the blimp with a little seat for me. Funny, I never noticed the gondola before. So much for me floating around in the belly.
Anyway, the gondola sits six: the captain Larry, our shooter Jorge, our audio guy Raul, my fearless producer Josh and me. One seat went empty for all our equipment.
The day started off great. Josh and I pulled up to the parking lot in the smallest car that’s legal to be out on the road. I mean, this was literally two seats and tires. (What was Josh thinking when he rented it?) So we pull up and the P.R. woman meets us in the parking lot and says, “You can drive right up to the blimp, just go that way”. Really? Is she kidding? You can’t possibly miss this blimp. I mean, it’s the blimp. It’s a mansion in the shape of a balloon. It’s ginormous. Our car was so small, just the fact that she had to tell us where the blimp was caused hysteria on a level barely seen before.
So we get inside the blimp and sure enough, it’s exactly the opposite of what I thought. There’s an XM satellite radio on board, a GPS navigational system exactly like one you’d have in your car, a porta-potty (I’ll spare details on that), a rear view mirror (in case another blimp starts honking because he wants to pass us, I guess), and, well, that’s about it. No beverage service, no movies on board, no seatbelts (we’re literally crawling in the air), wide open windows, and one super-inflated, ever-expanding, puffed-out balloon on top of us.
The feeling is exhilarating. Unlike a plane or a helicopter, you can literally stick your arm out the window and feel the cool air as you pass through it. If the engines are idle, you can just hang in free space up there and observe, which is what they do when they hover over a stadium shooting a big game. Captain Larry (right) even let me take over the reigns at one point… don’t worry, there isn’t exactly THAT much to it. Left foot on the pedal turns the blimp left. Right foot on the pedal turns the blimp right. The large steering well points us up or down. There is a full panel of buttons and knobs and computer data, but I just wanted to learn the basics.
After hanging up above for an hour, we began our descent--certainly not as easy as you’d think. It involves precise timing; you have to land and cut the engines at the same time the blimp team (20 people on the ground) grab hold of the ropes and begin loading the back of the gondola with 25-lb weights. But we landed safely, and I earned my wings. I even managed to learn a few things in the process:
- The blimp is 192 feet long, 58 feet high and carries 300 gallons of fuel.
- During World War II many of the Goodyear blimps provided the U.S. Navy with aerial surveillance.
- It took captain Larry 12 days to fly the blimp from Los Angeles to New York.
- It says “blimp pilot” on Larry’s business card. C’mon, how cool is it to pull that card out at parties?
Remember that episode of "Seinfeld" when George pretended to be the marine biologist to impress his date (“is anyone here a marine biologist?”)? Well, if I’m ever at an event and someone asks, “Can anyone here fly a blimp?” I just may have to raise my hand….and say….. “sort of”.
