Aaron Robinson takes to the skies in the Spirit of America.
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Commander Dave Bowling is a huge guy in a modest chair as we waft at 31 mph more than Los Angeles. Our torpedo-shaped shadow slithers more than freeways and swimming pools and glinting piles of junk in the backyards of tiny square homes arrayed in the orderly patterns of some extended-ago blueprint for suburban utopia. Somebody spots a vintage Camaro parked in a yard, but from 1500 feet up it could just as nicely be a Lexus. Bowling has a ’97 30th Anniversary Z28 and a ’69 Camaro that he’s restoring with his dad. When asked what he does for a living, Bowling often replies, “I sell tires.” It saves time.
This Goodyear blimp (there are 3 in the U.S.), the Spirit of America, lives just a handful of miles from me in a grassy field in Carson, California. It is right subsequent to the I-405 freeway, which suffers periodic “blimp impact,” which means that traffic slows perceptibly each and every time the blimp ascends in 1 of its close to-vertical departures. Right after 10 years of listening to the Spirit of America’s growl linger over our residence, and the subsequent paroxysms of terror from our 2 parrots, I decided to try to hitch a ride.
With the aid of the ground crew, you scramble up a quick staircase into the GZ-20A model, as Goodyear’s present blimps are known. Then the ship departs at an ICBM-like angle. The blimp weighs about 13,000 pounds just before you put in the helium, but ideally only around 200 pounds following, based on how several passengers (up to 6) and sandbags are aboard. The weight offers stability as the blimp flies, thrust forward by its twin 360-cubic-inch flat-6 Continental aircraft engines just fast sufficient to produce a little quantity of aerodynamic lift from its envelope and tail planes.
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Fast: Name a blimp that is not 1 of Goodyear’;s. |
Bowling controls tail-quantity N10A employing foot pedals for the rudders, a big wood-rimmed hand wheel for the elevators, a pair of throttles, and numerous pull-knobs that manage valves on the bottom of the blimp’s envelope that let him fine-tune the balance of the ship. It’s a busy job to keep a heading and the preferred 1500-foot cruising altitude. At 192 feet extended, the Spirit of America is like a giant jellyfish floating in the turbulent currents of L.A.’s sky, exactly where swirling ocean breezes and invisible thermal columns continuously shove the blimp this way or that. There is no autopilot, so after an hour or so at the controls, regularly ferrying around FOGs (buddies of Goodyear), Bowling usually lands to hand off to one more pilot.
Our initial destination is an inland golf course where Daniels Tire Service, a regional dealer celebrating 75 years handling Goodyear, is hosting an outing. We circle a couple of occasions, flashing salutations to the golfers through the ship’s 82,656-LED signboard. Due to the fact of the possible for a PR disaster, the blimp will display nothing at all that hasn’t been duly reviewed by business lawyers and vigorously spell-checked ahead of being sent as a sealed pc file from Goodyear’s headquarters. If there is a typo, something Bowling has seen only as soon as in his profession (it read “THANKSS”), he is powerless to repair it. He can only revert the board to a regular message. Could it by no means come to pass that somebody hacks the blimp.
From the golf course we wander south over the crosshatch runways of Lengthy Beach airport, observing a string of arriving airliners and a freshly made Boeing C-17, parked in front of its assembly plant, its military-gray corpulence adorned with the yellow and red roundels of the Spanish Air Force. As we make for the harbor and one particular of the world’s busiest container ports, the sun appears, the wind slackens, and the gondola’s windows are opened, letting us sling our elbows out. You do not hurry in a blimp at 30 to 40 mph, blimp travel is like crossing L.A. on a giant flying moped. It is a nostalgic check out to the Jurassic period of flight, when aircraft were large, soft-sided, and really, really subsonic.
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The blimp flies at the proper altitude to hold your interest—just high enough for passengers to argue whether it is a Camaro or a Lexus, but low enough that civilization is not decreased to a circuit-board abstraction. You can see dogs running in yards, youngsters pedaling bicycles, and mail carriers generating their rounds. All the diurnal, otherwise unremarkable functions of a contemporary city turn out to be a fascination from blimp h7
For groundlings, the blimp is a noisy flying billboard that lingers for long periods in otherwise placid skies. But it is not necessarily an unwelcome 1. Goodyear, which sold far more than 162 million tires final year worldwide, long ago realized that its message goes down greater when tied to a spectacle. Particularly a quaint, squishy, slow-moving spectacle that looks friendly and huggable, like the Michelin Man. There’s just something about pneumatically inflated objects that makes us smile.
Our ride completed, we sink back into L.A., that gray basin of poured concrete teeming with the metal-flaked, pearl-coated beetles of rushing vehicles. Much more than Goodyear’s other 2 blimps, the Spirit of America flies more than the purest distillation of that which tires and the automobile have enabled. Like some gassy god, it appears down upon its creation.
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