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Thread: Blinp ?

  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by FlyingRon View Post
    The current Goodyear fleet is "semi-rigid." Van Wagner (the operators of things like the MetLife ones) still flies non-rigid ones.
    According to what I've read the Goodyear blimps are also non-rigid airships.

  2. #12

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    A couple of years ago (when the Royals won the World Series), they parked a blimp at the downtown airport where I was based. It didn't cause a lot of air traffic congestion except during launch and recovery. I suppose you could launch the thing from Pioneer Field and keep it out of the traffic pattern. I hope they would bring it in at least a week prior to the show and stay until several days after the show. My only concern would be the disruption to air traffic.

  3. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Floatsflyer View Post
    According to what I've read the Goodyear blimps are also non-rigid airships.
    The three that are currently flying, are as I stated, semi-rigid. It's essentially a sled with one central backbone.

  4. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by FlyingRon View Post
    Van Wagner (the operators of things like the MetLife ones) still flies non-rigid ones.
    MetLife dumped their blimps when they moved away from the Peanuts characters in their marketing a couple years. Van Wagner then got rid of their blimp operation. Except for an occasional short-term sponsorship blimp as part of a promotion, Goodyear the only lighter than air left flying nationally.

  5. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by DRGT View Post
    A couple of years ago (when the Royals won the World Series), they parked a blimp at the downtown airport where I was based. It didn't cause a lot of air traffic congestion except during launch and recovery. I suppose you could launch the thing from Pioneer Field and keep it out of the traffic pattern. I hope they would bring it in at least a week prior to the show and stay until several days after the show. My only concern would be the disruption to air traffic.
    .

    When the Blimp has been at Airventure in the past, it did operate out of Pioneer, and just did fly-bys over Wittman

  6. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by FlyingRon View Post
    The three that are currently flying, are as I stated, semi-rigid. It's essentially a sled with one central backbone.
    I was under the impression that the new ships were actually Zeppelins.
    I don't know if it is true, but I heard years ago that the term blimp came from the designation of a "Class B Limp Airship."

  7. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by dclaxon View Post
    I heard years ago that the term blimp came from the designation of a "Class B Limp Airship."
    You must have been misinformed. That's ED medical terminology.

  8. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by dclaxon View Post
    I was under the impression that the new ships were actually Zeppelins.
    I don't know if it is true, but I heard years ago that the term blimp came from the designation of a "Class B Limp Airship."
    That's one of the stories. Don't think there's any evidence, though.

    Another is that the name comes from British Army slang... "Colonel Blimp" was used to refer to a fat, useless officer.

    A third is that the term is onomatopedic. Supposedly a Colonel Blimp sort of officer was inspecting a blimp one day. He thumped the fabric, and thought the sound it made sounded like "blimp".

    "Zeppelins" are actually dirigibles, which are airships with shapes that don't alter with the presence of the lifting gas. They're named for their inventor, Count Von Zeppelin.

    And when it comes down to it, "dirigible" merely means, "steerable." The name was co-opted for the airship type.

    Ron "Worthless trivia a specialty" Wanttaja

  9. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by dclaxon View Post
    I was under the impression that the new ships were actually Zeppelins.
    They are joint developments of Goodyear and Zeppelin. Zeppelin's other projects are also semi-rigid these days.
    I don't know if it is true, but I heard years ago that the term blimp came from the designation of a "Class B Limp Airship."
    It's a widely held belief, but it's wrong. The best guess is that it's an onomatopoeic description of the sound it makes when you thump the envelope. Neither of the stories relating to "limp" roots seems to show any historical evidence to support it. Almost any pre-WWII word historically is unlikely to be an acronym.

  10. #20

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    The three new Goodyear semi-rigid airships are not really "blimps" but Goodyear will call them blimps anyway.
    See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodyear_Blimp

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