In June 2025, Goodyear marked one hundred years since the Pilgrim first lifted off from Wingfoot Lake in 1925, the airship that gave the company’s advertising fleet its start. A century of continuous flight sounds like the story of one enduring machine. It is not. The Pilgrim was retired decades ago. Goodyear’s last true non-rigid blimp, Spirit of Innovation, came down for good in 2017. What actually turned one hundred is a program, a brand, a habit of keeping something old-fashioned in the sky for reasons that have shifted more than once across the century. The aircraft flying today over the Rose Bowl and the Super Bowl is not the same vessel. It is not, strictly speaking, even a blimp.
Goodyear’s centenary and the year Washington first moved to control the nation’s helium supply are the same year, 1925. Nobody organising the anniversary celebrations appears to have noticed.
Why So Few Airships Exist, and Why This One Persists
Airships occupy an odd corner of American aviation law. The Federal Aviation Administration treats them as a “special class” of aircraft, borrowing airworthiness standards from fixed-wing rules and old US Navy design data rather than writing rules built for them from scratch. The most recent FAA advisory circular addressing airship type certification dates to 1992, built on Navy airship experience that itself ended in 1962 when the last military airship was decommissioned. Little has moved since either date.
That regulatory stillness is not incidental. Type certification for a new aircraft design costs enormous sums, and so few airships are built that no manufacturer has much incentive to absorb that cost. Add to this the post-9/11 world of Temporary Flight Restrictions over stadiums and public gatherings, airspace an aircraft too slow to outrun a no-fly zone cannot easily navigate, and the picture becomes clear. Airships have not been banned. They have simply been left in a regulatory backwater rare enough that almost nobody bothers trying to enter it, which is precisely why the handful that do fly become so recognisable.
The fear these machines once produced has not disappeared. It has changed shape.
What Airships Meant Before They Meant Advertising
Long before the Goodyear name was painted on the side of one, airships had already given a city its first taste of war from the sky. On the night of 8 September 1915, a German Zeppelin designated L13, commanded by Heinrich Mathy, crossed London and dropped a three-ton bomb, the largest yet used in the war, on the textile district north of St Paul’s Cathedral. It remains, in the historical record of the war, the single most damaging Zeppelin raid on the city. More than half a million pounds of damage followed, somewhere in the region of £65 to 70 million in today’s money, more than half the total material cost of every raid London suffered that year.
The scars are still there to see. The wall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, near Bartholomew Close where the bomb fell, still carries the shrapnel marks. Lincoln’s Inn Chapel bears marks of its own from a separate raid. London newspapers of the time gave the airships a nickname that stuck: baby killers, after the deaths of children in the raids. The fear these machines produced was immediate, documented, and entirely reasonable at the time.
H.G. Wells had published The War in the Air in 1908, describing fleets of airships bombing cities from above. Seven years later, Zeppelins did exactly that over London. Wells got no more credit for the warning than Cassandra did.
Zeppelins stopped working as weapons for a specific technical reason, separate from any of this. By 1916, British fighter aircraft armed with incendiary ammunition could reach the altitudes airships flew at and set their hydrogen alight. Germany shifted to fixed-wing Gotha bombers for its later London raids. The terror an airship could once produce over a city did not end there. It simply moved, decades later, into a different and unrelated collapse of the civilian passenger trade, one with its own separate cause.
Zeppelin’s Near-Death, and Its Quiet Revival
That second collapse belongs to Zeppelin the company as much as to any single aircraft. World War II destroyed the original works. For half a century afterward, the Zeppelin name existed mostly as a memory. Then, in 1993, a spin-off called Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik was founded in Friedrichshafen, funded from a decades-old endowment tied to the original Zeppelin fortune, to see whether a new generation of airships could be built at all. In 1997, its first prototype flew for forty minutes, the first rigid or semi-rigid airship the firm had built since the war.
It did not sell well. Through the 2000s, a handful of Zeppelin NT aircraft flew short sightseeing routes over Lake Constance and, briefly, San Francisco Bay. The revival was real but commercially thin.
The Contract That Changed That
A Preview at the World’s Fair
Eighty years before that contract, the same pattern had already played out once. In 1933, Goodyear’s own airship, the Puritan, was one of the more popular attractions at Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair, its own dedicated flying field selling rides over the fairgrounds as part of an exposition built to sell industrial optimism to a country deep in the Depression. That October, the actual Zeppelin, the Graf, flew over the same fairgrounds, circling Lake Michigan before landing nearby, its arrival conditional on the American government agreeing to share postal stamp revenue with the German company that owned it. Its tail fin had just been painted with a swastika under new Nazi Air Ministry regulations, controversial enough that Commander Eckener flew a careful clockwise circuit so the city’s German-American population would see only the ship’s tricolor flag. Two rival airship programs, one American, one German, shared a sky over the same fairground in the same year, and even then, it was American money changing hands to keep the German one flying.
Then in 2011, Goodyear placed an order for three Zeppelin NT airships, at a cost of roughly €14.5 million. Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik described it, at the time, as the largest single sale in the company’s history, doubling its entire production fleet in one contract. Components were built in Friedrichshafen and shipped to Akron, Ohio, for final assembly at Wingfoot Lake, itself the oldest airship field in the United States. The first of the new Goodyear airships, Wingfoot One, entered service in 2014, seventy years after the original Goodyear-Zeppelin partnership had dissolved at the start of World War II.
Press coverage of the Goodyear Blimp centenary called it, repeatedly, a relic of American culture, a symbol of the nation. What the record actually shows is narrower and stranger. The aircraft is designed and manufactured by a German firm that had nearly no commercial future left. What kept that firm’s production line running was an American tire company’s contract.
The Hindenburg, Weighed Correctly
No account of Zeppelin history avoids the Hindenburg, so it is worth stating what the record actually supports. Graf Zeppelin, the Hindenburg’s sister ship, flew 590 flights and more than a million miles, carrying over thirteen thousand passengers, without a single fatality. The cause of the Hindenburg fire itself has never been conclusively established. The leading theory points to a static spark igniting leaking hydrogen; lightning strike and sabotage are both recognised as historical alternatives, though neither has been proven. What is established is the reason the airship carried hydrogen at all rather than the far safer helium it was designed for: the United States, which controlled the world’s helium supply, had restricted its export under the Helium Conservation Act of 1925 and the Helium Control Act of 1927. Germany was left to use the flammable gas because Washington had decided it should not have the safe one.
An industry with a genuinely strong safety record ended in thirty-four seconds, for reasons that trace back to a piece of American legislation as much as to anything that happened over Lakehurst that evening.
The Revival Now Underway
The airship has not stayed retired. In October 2025, LTA Research, funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, flew its Pathfinder 1, the first giant rigid airship built in over ninety years, over the Golden Gate Bridge. Hybrid Air Vehicles, based at Cardington in Bedfordshire, the same historic airship sheds where Britain’s R101 was built a century ago, is moving production of its Airlander 10 to a new facility in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, capable of building up to twenty-four aircraft a year. France’s Flying Whales, backed by the French government and Quebec, is building cargo airships in partnership with Dassault and Safran. Lockheed Martin remains an active name in the current market.
Every one of these companies frames its own pitch in the language of green aviation: lower emissions, no runway infrastructure required, sustainability as the selling point. That is not an outside reading of their marketing. It is their marketing.
What Hybrid Air Vehicles Was Actually Built On
Hybrid Air Vehicles’ own history with military money runs deeper than a single headline. Its founding prototype, the HAV-304, was built for the US Army’s Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle programme before that project was cancelled and the airframe was converted to civilian use as the Airlander 10. UK and EU government grants, totalling some seven million pounds by 2016, carried that conversion forward. In September 2023, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with BAE Systems to explore defence applications. Around the same time, the US Department of Defense funded a research agreement studying Airlander’s potential as a logistics connector for the Navy and Marine Corps. Then, in October 2025, an undisclosed defence contractor formally reserved three Airlander 10 aircraft, the platform’s first confirmed step into military use, as part of what the company describes as a 3.7 billion dollar defence pipeline.
No sensitive defence programme announces itself in advance. That is not a claim about this one. It is simply how these things have always worked, and the paper trail here, government research funding, a private industry memorandum, then years later a public reservation, is the shape that quiet groundwork generally takes before anyone is told what it was for.
Closing the Circle
This is the fifth piece in TB’s Air Ship series. The first, on Graf Zeppelin, traced the golden age of long-range airship travel and the round-the-world flight that proved it possible. The second, on Hindenburg LZ 129, covered the disaster and the helium politics that ended it. The third looked at the mooring masts and rooftop infrastructure built to service an industry that once expected airships to be as ordinary as trains. The fourth, on the airship NORGE, followed Umberto Nobile’s airship across the Arctic ice cap in 1926, territory nothing else could reach at the time.
The Goodyear Blimp closes that arc somewhere unexpected: a century-long habit of keeping something old and slow in the air, discarded once by a nation’s helium policy and a public fire, kept alive since by a tire company’s contract, and now, quietly, being reserved again by people who have not yet said what for.
Wells saw it coming in 1908. Nobody believed him either.
