The Air Keeps It Interesting

In the darkness it was nothing but a thin low thrum, moving to a higher pitch as it neared. The Goodyear Blimp was somewhere out there. I stared into the sky off Venice Beach, California, trying to locate the thing. A woman in a polo shirt (Goodyear blue) approached and pointed to a faint glow and dark outline directly above us. She was part of the blimp’s ground crew. “You know, this model is retiring soon,” she said. // Retiring, I learned, was a nice way of saying decommissioning, and decommissioning was a nice way of saying stripped and scrapped. Bits of it might show up in a museum somewhere, but that was pretty much it. There was one thing, though: a long final ride up the coast of California and beyond, twenty-nine days, 2,200 miles. “Would you like to come along for a leg?” // At the blimp base in Carson, California, about thirty minutes south of Los Angeles, I met Matt St. John and William Bayliss, blimp pilots. St. John, the senior pilot, had been flying the Spirit for nearly ten years. I asked him how long he thought the trip would take, some 170 miles northwest up to Santa Maria. “That’s the thing about blimps,” he said. Maybe eight, nine hours, all depending on headwinds. No promises, no bathroom. // The airfield was similar in purpose but different in kind than normal airfields—just a few acres of flat grass, with a big paved circle in the middle and a large pole to which the blimp was attached. Takeoffs and landings here were dicey. A breeze could come up and threaten to blow the blimp into traffic on the 405 Freeway or the large billboard by the road that boasted the blimp’s likeness, with the possibility of the actual blimp crashing into an advertisement for itself. The air in Los Angeles could be strange; it often got colder as you drifted toward the ground, instead of warmer, as it does nearly everywhere else. Cold air hastened the descent as the helium condensed, so instead of slowing as you land, you speed up. The point, Bayliss said, was that nothing on a blimp is routine, and nothing is a given, and that’s the joy of blimp flight.