The Goodyear Blimp is an international icon, but for folks like me based in Northeast Ohio the good Sir Wingfoot is something of a local celebrity. I see the incredible yellow and blue fella on occasion just taking trips to the grocery store, or out at a football game. Everybody knows the guy, he’s got friends everywhere, and his only mission in life is to get you to buy tires. Late last year I mentioned in a blog that I wanted to ride in the Blimp above the Indy 500, and if you speak something out into the universe, it just might frickin’ happen! On the Monday before the 500, Goodyear reached out to me to see if I was still interested and let me know they had one open seat I could take. Yes, excuse me, I’ll drop everything to drive to Indianapolis a day early to make this happen, thank you.
The Blimp — actually not a blimp but a semi-rigid dirigible — wouldn’t be able to take me to the track on race day, as the crew had to do a flyover in the morning before heading straight to Charlotte, N.C. for the Coke 600. But they could do the next best thing and get me above the track on Legends Day, the Saturday before the 500. I’ll take it! So I showed up to a small regional private jet airport about 40 miles east of the race track on Saturday morning, ready to go. I should mention here that I’m incredibly afraid of heights, but I figured this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I resolved to suck it up and do the damn thing.
Bradley Brownell
After a brief orientation discussion, myself and three other passengers were loaded one at a time into the small gondola hanging down below the ship’s airframe.
Over Indianapolis
Absolutely blistered with anticipation I took my seat aboard the blimp, shaped remarkably like a commercial airplane seat but with several feet more legroom. I was told that it was a perfect flying day, as it wasn’t windy, the air was cool and dense enough that the helium inside the ship would float with ease, and it was also sunny, increasing the helium’s expansion energy through solar heat. This set my mind at ease a little more, but I still felt compelled to ask one of the pilots what the failure modes of a blimp are. “Our rotors are powered by three Lycoming four-cylinder aircraft engines, one on each side and one at the back. It’s extremely unlikely, but if they all failed at once we would lose control of direction, but not lift,” she assured me. The blimp can regulate its height even engineless, with a bunch of water ballast onboard that can be dumped to gain altitude in an emergency, and vents to bleed off helium to reduce altitude and gently glide into a landing. “I can’t be positive, but this is probably the safest thing flying in the sky right now,” she added.
Bradley Brownell
The blimp’s gondola isn’t pressurized, and there are a few flip-down windows that can be opened to allow an unobstructed view of your surroundings. I found the large plexi windows on all sides of the gondola to offer enough of a view for me, and the idea of opening that window and dropping something out of it gives me full scale spinal shiver heebee jeebies. Unlike a tiny two square-foot window next to your seat on an airplane, the blimp features a giant four foot by three foot window mere milimeters from your butt cheek. It was definitely freaky, and I never felt comfortable enough to stand up out of my chair, but good God, those views are incredible.
Chasing shadows
Taking off from a wide open field, the blimp hovered gently until it was a couple dozen feet above the ground, then tipped its nose upward and began a steep ascent that felt almost like a mix between the sway of being drunk on a speedboat and the effortless glide of a small schoolbus strapped to a magic carpet. Unless you’ve experienced flight by blimp before, you’ll never truly comprehend the feeling. Unlike Goodyear’s old cable-operated twin-engine blimps, this new generation of dirigible is totally fly by wire, meaning the engines can be moved up off the gondola onto the airframe itself. Because the engines are now remote, the flight is also freakishly quiet, with most of the sound bouncing directly off the blimp’s outer membrane. At a cruising altitude about 2500 feet above sea level, 800-ish feet above the hardpack soil, everything down there looks so small.
For much of the flight from the airport to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway I was lost in thought, tracing a car’s journey on Indy’s I-465 ring road, or spotting a bright orange Corvette parked in the Saturday sun getting ready for a weekend drive, or admiring how much the trees of Fort Harrison State Park look like a head of broccoli from this height. Once we got to the track, however, my excitement overran my fear. I love Indianapolis Motor Speedway so much that I didn’t mind floating in mid-air above the track quite so much.
Over the speedway
Indianapolis is a place of legend. The self-described “racing capital of the world” plays home to perhaps the single most important motorsport event anywhere in the world. While the track was relatively quiet on Saturday, something like half a million people were en route to spend their Sunday watching 33 idiots run 230 miles per hour. I was among them.
I’ve been to Indianapolis Motor Speedway five times, once for the 2007 Formula One United States Grand Prix and four times for the 500, every year since 2022. There isn’t a bad view of the place, especially when race cars are ripping across the incredible yard of bricks, but I think the best view possible is from above. The pilot stuck the blimp in hover mode for a while and we just kind of floated around the track, stuck like glue in a surreal silence. This is easily the coolest thing I’ve ever experienced. If you ever get a chance to go up in one of Goodyear’s four (three in the U.S. and one in Europe) semi-rigid dirigibles, absolutely do it. Even if you’re afraid of heights. This kicks ass.
