Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
A new blimp on the rise
Goodyear’s Wingfoot One comes to South Florida
Get ready for more sightings of Wingfoot One, the newest version of the Goodyear blimp.
You’ll see it in the air above the Orange Bowl and college bowl games in Miami and Boca Raton. It will be hovering over Miami Heat games on Dec. 14 and 27 and a Miami Hurricanes basketball game on Jan. 12.
If you miss those opportunities, chances are you’ll see the blimp flying over the beaches between Fort Lauderdale and Delray Beach through the holiday season.
“The holidays do get more busy,” said blimp pilot Capt. Andrew Rose.
More interested in seeing Wingfoot One up close? You can check it out by its Pompano Beach hangar on Saturday and Sunday as part of the U.S. Marines’ Toys For Tots campaign.
“When you see it from the side or you see it from a distance or in the air it just doesn’t look as big as it actually is,” Rose said. “When you get up next to it you get some scale and you realize it’s a lot bigger than you thought it was.”
In most cases, the only people who get to ride in a blimp
are those who have won flight certificates at auctions for local charities.
Those flights have generated over $1 million for nonprofit organizations throughout South Florida during the past five years, said blimp spokesman Daniel Smith.
Wingfoot One is the next generation of airships. Unlike earlier blimps, it is more like a zeppelin with a semi-rigid frame-structure inside the helium-filled envelope. Wingfoot Two was christened in Akron, Ohio, in early November, and Wingfoot Three will be assembled next year.
All will replace older, slower, smaller, noisier blimps, which have a storied history in South Florida.
The U.S. Navy set up an airship base in the 1930s in Opa-locka, where the 785-foot long USS Akron and sister ship USS Macon would moor.
The Goodyear Enterprise was based in Opalocka until it moved in the late 1970s to the Pompano Beach Airpark, where the Spirit of Akron, Stars & Stripes and the Spirit of Innovation were also based.
Southwest Miami-Dade was the site of Naval Air Station Richmond in the 1940s, launching airships to search for German submarines off the Atlantic coast. US Navy blimp K-74 got into a rare firefight with a U-boat in 1943 and became the only airship of its kind to be shot down. One crewman died.
Coral Springs was the site of a mishap in 2005 when Goodyear’s Stars & Stripes crash-landed in a public storage yard during a sudden summer storm. No one was seriously hurt.
So, would these gentle giants ever be a viable alternative to airplanes?
“Only if you’re not in a hurry,” Rose said, chuckling.