I was on the Goodyear blimp above London – here’s what it was like
Unless you’ve fully committed to hiding from the heatwave, you’ve probably noticed the return of the iconic Goodyear blimp, which has been cruising above the London skyline for the first time since 2022. With a capacity of just 14, getting a seat beneath its 75 metre balloon has been like finding a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. I managed to nab a spot – here’s what it’s like…
Airships, like Tony Blair, were the future once. During the 1920s and 30s – the “golden age of the dirigible” – lighter-than-air travel was seen as a viable alternative to the aeroplane, a utopian method of transport that could whisk both freight and passengers vast distances using relatively little fuel. By the late 1920s, they were making regular transatlantic crossings, the journey taking a leisurely 110 hours.
Blimps through history
The first airship to use helium gas as its method of flotation – The Goodyear Pilgrim – sailed in 1925, but most airships of the time still favoured highly flammable hydrogen, which was cheaper, easier to produce and has more lift. The drawbacks, however, were broadcast around the world in the wake of the Hindenburg disaster of 1937 (“Oh the humanity…”), signalling the abrupt end of the airship as a serious commercial force.
Today there are as few as 25 in operation. There are more astronauts than there are airship pilots. Tyre giant Goodyear remains the posterboy for these gentle giants with a fleet of four airships (technically the Goodyear blimp is not a blimp – it has a semi-rigid skeleton, making it a zeppelin-blimp hybrid), only one of which resides in Europe.
So early on Friday morning I made the trip to Damyns Hall Aerodrome in Upminster, where the blimp – I’m going to keep calling it a blimp because blimp is fun to say – is docked. It’s hard to overstate the scale of the thing when you see it up close: 75 metres is the equivalent of two and a half blue whales and it stands as tall as four double decker buses.
Weight management is crucial when you’re trying to coax a nine tonne behemoth to float through the clouds, so boarding is a one-on, one-off affair. The first thing to surprise me was the fact the blimp doesn’t land, exactly – it just floats lower. The steps leading to the cabin don’t touch the ground, they sway a foot above it.
The cabin, which is dwarfed by the balloon that mushrooms above it, is similar to an aeroplane, except the seats line vast windows, some of which are open, triggering a sudden fear that I might get sucked out. The cabin isn’t pressurised, of course – this thing has a maximum altitude of 3,000 metres but prefers to cruise at just 300. One by one we take our seats and within seconds we’re rising into the air, the ground receding at a not insubstantial rate. For a few seconds I have a sweaty-palmed wave of panic as I try not to think about floating in a metal shell held aloft by the same stuff used in children’s party balloons.
But it moves with an insouciant grace and my fear soon dissolves. I get chatting with a man who works for a haulage company: he fits out his entire fleet with Goodyear tyres and this is a business perk. When we reach 300m, we’re allowed to take off our seatbelts and wander around. The pilots are only separated from the rest of us by a little step, so you can watch them as they prod and pull at various buttons and levers; their side windows are open and I wonder if they got a ‘right arm tan’ this week.
We chart a route west, chugging past the warehouses of the docklands, past the O2 Arena and onwards towards Canary Wharf. There’s a low hum from the propellers but nothing like the noise of an aircraft cabin. The blimp occasionally lists as we follow the curve of the river but it’s remarkably unfrightening up here, even for someone with a mild fear of heights.
It’s a great vantage from which to take in London, high enough that skyscrapers seem like building blocks, but low enough that you can make out human-sized details. As we drift over Charlton Lido I can see a man doing a graceful breast stroke; on a vivid green square I can make out the neon fizz of a tennis ball; somewhere around Bromley a horse gallops around a paddock; in people’s back gardens I spot a thousand trampolines and paddling pools.
As the impulse to take a thousand photographs (there’s the Tate Modern! There’s the Houses of Parliament! There’s the London Eye!) begins to wane, my fellow passengers and I fall into a subdued hush, gazing slack-jawed at this new aspect of London, seen not from the rumbling tube of an aeroplane but a tranquil, bobbing carriage suspended beneath a bulging sack of helium. The Goodyear blimp is at once beautiful and ridiculous, retro and futuristic, poetical and absurd.
We gently descend and, this being the final flight of the day, the blimp is moored to a huge truck. A pilot will remain with it until it’s ready to take to the skies again tomorrow. I can still see its silhouette bobbing gently above the ground as my taxi pulls away from the airfield. “Oh my god,” says the driver when he spots it. “Do you mind if I stop and take a photo?” Everybody loves the blimp: there really is nothing quite like it.
• If you would would like to learn more about the Goodyear Blimp and the Goodyear brand today, visit the website here