This looks like Clipper's doing to me!

**somaliavet** · 07-26-2013 06:10

I saw this week that Goodyear is making the transition back to zeppelins. How long before Clipper's elves crank one out, I wonder?

http://www.airships.net/blog/goodyear-zeppelin-70-years

**Attila57** · 07-26-2013 06:58

I remember a Goodyear airship flying over Rome for months in the 80, with a lighting system for advertising signs on the sides (look at this picture). It was awesome. Its hangar was at Capena, near Rome.

Attachment 100574

In 2011 another Goodyear dirigibile flyght over Rome (look the videos of this airship http://www.dirigibilegoodyear.it/video/). But there was a crash in June at Reichelsheim (Germany) and the pilot died (the other three passenger were saved)

I hope to see this new airhsip again over Rome.

**Flying Officer Kyte** · 07-26-2013 11:55

A very interesting series of video clips there Attilio.
I did like the Vivaldi accompaniment to the last clip.
Rob.

**clipper1801** · 07-26-2013 12:24

Ah, yes. Found out a few years ago that the town south of me named "Goodyear" was started by the Goodyear company to grow cotton for their rubber production, the head of the program and community was the same gentleman who developed the US dirigibles under license with Zeppelin in the 1930's-very small world indeed! Zeppelins are in the soil and water out here in Arizona . . . From their website:

"In September, 1923, the two companies created the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation. Goodyear president Paul W. Litchfield was a leading supporter of the rigid airship and the two firms worked closely throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Zeppelin captain Ernst Lehmann and engineer Karl Arnstein, along with other Zeppelin personnel, moved to Akron, Ohio to help Goodyear-Zeppelin build airships using Zeppelin Company patents. The culmination of the joint venture was the construction of the airships Akron and Macon for the United States Navy in the early 1930s. Relations between the companies became strained after the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation was dissolved in December, 1940."

I live a few blocks off of "Litchfield Road" which cuts into "Goodyear, AZ" named after Paul Litchfield himself . . . kinda cool. Our local Stadium has the sports blimps visit every year as well, one can often hear one passing overhead-VERY COOL! Then there are the new generation of airships that live here:

I want one of these, Mrs Clipper says maybe with my next wife, what does that mean?

**Jager** · 07-26-2013 15:54

Living in Akron, Ohio, I see blimps all the time. The airdock is impressive.
Karl

**Captain Chum** · 07-26-2013 16:01

I miss the blimps on football Sunday.

**Suffern** · 07-26-2013 20:05

My mother grew up in NJ, not far from Lakehurst. My father (an Air Force Pilot) would often have business at McGuire and he took us along. The blimps are certainly impressive.
When we were small, my mother would tell us about the Zeppelins flying in from overseas and passing over their town on the way to Lakehurst. She says (and I have reason to believe her) that they watched the Hindenburg fly over on that fateful evening. She would have been twelve years old at the time. It always sent chills through us to hear her tell it.
A regional dairy here has its own blimp (Hood) and it landed in town once, oh, about twenty, twenty-five years ago (probably while G. H. W. Bush was VP or Pres) and I got to talk to the crew but they would not give me a tour but I did peek in the windows. Definitely not a military machine <g>. Much too posh. As far as I could tell, it would be one of the very nicest ways to travel imaginable. Perhaps after my third mil...

**csadn** · 07-26-2013 23:03

From what I can read, it isn't a rigid airship, but at best a semi-rigid (keel along the bottom of the envelope for attaching the gondola and engines).