A Friend in the Skies : Airship: The Goodyear Blimp may be just a giant billboard to some people, but to folks in the South Bay, it's an institution--and it's theirs.

By KENNETH J. GARCIA

April 5, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

As corporate symbols go, the Goodyear Blimp has soared to heights unmatched by most other business icons.

People don’t just identify with the blimp. They actually sympathize with it. How else to explain the get well cards the airship received after its well-publicized collision with a remote-controlled airplane in late 1990?

The Carson-based airship suffered a foot-square gash after absorbing a direct hit from the plane, but the potential disaster barely left a skid mark on the tire company’s image. Even enemy aircraft, it seems, can’t deflate the world’s largest publicity machine.

For it is publicity, as much as helium, that has kept the 192-foot-long vehicle afloat for 25 years in Southern California. Indeed, it has become such a South Bay fixture that local residents have taken the blimp under their wing--visiting it, waving goodby to it, and inquiring about it whenever its leaves home for a few weeks.

When officials in Redondo Beach went looking for a vehicle to promote the city’s virtues before the 1984 Olympics, it decided to ride the blimp’s good name onto the airwaves. The city, with Goodyear’s blessing, adopted the blimp as its official city bird and made headlines across the nation.

“The blimp has become an American institution,” said Nick Nicolary, chief pilot of the Carson-based airship Eagle, one of three blimps owned, built and operated by Goodyear in the United States. “People think of it as their blimp. When we go away for a few days, we get calls from people asking us, ‘What have you done with our blimp?’ ”

What they have done to the blimp recently is rename it--it was formerly the Columbia--and repaint it to match the company’s silver, blue and gold colors. As if they needed more air time, the Eagle moniker was added to tout Goodyear’s best-selling tire.

But try as they might to pitch rubber tires with the company’s blimps, it’s the emotional appeal of the dirigible that has fueled its popularity. Surveys show that people don’t think of the blimp as a floating ad campaign for a huge American corporation. To them, the blimp is a friend.

“It’s not really a measurable thing, but a blimp is viewed as kind of a big, warm and fuzzy thing by consumers,” said Peter Riordan, a vice president at BBDO, the large advertising firm that did a survey on blimps in 1990. “Blimps are somewhat unique things. I don’t think the sky is ever going to be black with these things so that it might be difficult to get a suntan.”

Part of the reason for its popularity is that the blimp has become ubiquitous. It’s at every World Series, almost every “Monday Night Football” game, major golf tournaments, the Indianapolis 500 and more college bowl games than a professional scout. It was at Elizabeth Taylor’s 60th birthday bash in Disneyland as well as Andy and Fergie’s royal wedding in London.

Rain, hail and snow may stop the blimp, but almost nothing else gets between the blimp’s aerial shots and the free publicity given to Goodyear’s airships by network and cable television.

“The way I see it is that the blimp is an adjunct to a television production,” said Mickey Wittman, manager of airship programs for Goodyear at the company’s headquarters in Akron. “You can do without it but it adds another dimension. When we first started using a blimp for television, it was unique. But now it’s useful. It is provides the best camera platform in the world.”

The blimp may be viewed as a flying happy face and has become linked permanently with sporting events, but that doesn’t accurately reflect its rich history and distinguished military career. During World War II, the Navy maintained a fleet of more than 100 blimps, built by the Goodyear Rubber & Tire Co. and used to escort military convoys across the Atlantic.

Although the military blimps were replaced by helicopters and airplanes in the early 1960s, the military design is still visible in most of today’s models, except for some ships built by American Blimp and Virgin Lightships. Those blimps are about 60 feet shorter and cost about one-third as much as the $5 million it takes to raise one of the Goodyear airships from the drawing board to the sky.

Since 1925, more than 1 million passengers have flown Goodyear blimps without an injury and company officials say that there’s only an extremely remote possibility that the helium envelope--made of rubber-coated polyester fabric--will deflate.

However, the impulse to look at blimps as flying whales is not without precedent. A routine flight for the Eagle to cover a 49ers-Rams game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco takes 13 hours. Since its top speed is about 35 m.p.h., an old moped can probably outrun it. And it’s not exactly a luxurious ride. Passengers in the blimp’s gondola almost need to shout at each other to be heard above the engine noise.

But the engine is important. If the two, 210-horsepower, fuel-injected piston engines were to fail, the blimp would become a very strange-looking and difficult to maneuver hot-air balloon, according to Crayton.

That it has become a fixture at major events across the United States points to the company’s adherence to it’s blimp-as-billboard philosophy. Three blimps are strategically stationed throughout the country (California, Texas and Florida), so the airships are able to cover almost every part of the country for those famed aerial shots.

Those shots are provided free by Goodyear in exchange for something more valuable: commercial air time. Under an agreement with the television networks, Goodyear will provide aerial footage in exchange for one shot of the blimp each hour. Football fans know that that means at least three glimpses of the tire company’s airship during a game.

During an event like the Super Bowl, when air time goes for about $800,000 per minute, a few shots of the hovering craft can pay for the blimp’s hefty costs for more than a month. Some companies pay up to $300,000 per month to lease a similar airship.

Those costs are the reason more dirigibles aren’t filling the skies. Blimps are expensive. The Eagle requires a crew of nearly 25 people, and near-24-hour maintenance. It’s the main reason most companies that use them, including Metropolitan Life and Citibank, lease the ships and their crews rather than own them outright, as Goodyear and Fuji do.

“Blimps are very costly and labor-intensive,” said BBDO’s Riordan. “And the blimp isn’t a medium in itself. You basically have to fill up its dance card because it doesn’t do anything. And that’s why they’ve basically become event makers as much as just attending events.”

Indeed, it was none other than the blimp Columbia (now the Eagle) that provided early shots of the Bay Area Earthquake in 1989, as the ship was in perfect position to film the huge San Francisco fire and partial Bay Bridge collapse from its lofty perch.

Crayton, who was flying the ship at the time, called it a “wild experience” to silently watch the huge blaze in San Francisco and then watch as the city slowly faded to black.

But the blimp’s daily schedule is much more mundane. The Carson airship usually makes about 10 flights a day, carrying Goodyear corporate clients and sales personnel for 45-minute rides around the southern coast. (Rides are not available to the general public.) At night, the blimp dons its lighted billboard cap, flashing signs for charities and other promotions.

The blimp’s flight path along the coast is done for more than scenic purposes. Because helium is their main ingredient, blimps don’t gain much altitude. Rarely will you find one of the airships above the 5,000-foot level, which is why you won’t see the big, silver bullet hovering over Denver’s stadium or most other Rocky Mountain locales.

There are other limitations. You won’t find the blimp flying over the Forum in Inglewood, because the arena is located within Los Angeles International Airport’s flight space. And the blimp is not immune to orders from higher authorities. Even when Goodyear had its Europa airship moored in Rome, it couldn’t get permission to fly over the Vatican.

No matter how long the blimp stays afloat, most people still want to know if it could be shot down. Goodyear officials, who don’t like to talk about the vulnerability of their flying corporate symbols, say the blimps won’t go down easily. They say that a blimp’s envelope can be punctured with small holes without suffering greatly, assuming the tears can be patched fairly quickly. However, a major rupture, like one caused by the model airplane, “means that you to set it down, now” Crayton said.

Pilots, in fact, say that blimps are most vulnerable when they are on the ground, as evidenced by the one that was destroyed at the Carson base during a freak storm in 1981, after a gust pushed the tail fin into the inflated envelope.

For when a blimp is deflated, “it’s basically dead,” said Bob Urhausen, spokesman for Goodyear’s West Coast airship operations.

But that’s about the only thing that will kill the blimp, for the company has no plans to eliminate the airships. If anything, the rise in the number of blimps used by other large companies to promote their products is seen by Goodyear as a sign that they were decades ahead of their competitors.

“It’s amazing,” Urhausen said, “how far this thing has gone when you think that it’s mostly helium and fabric.”