The Goodyear Blimp is any one of a fleet of airships (or dirigibles) operated by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, used mainly for advertising purposes and capturing aerial views of live sporting events for television.

75m long The Blimp is 75m long - around the same as two and a half blue whales. The Blimp carries two pilots and up to 14 passengers. The Blimp may be big but it's so simple to take off and land that it requires just three ground crew.

Goodyear has operated a Blimp base in Pompano Beach, Florida, since 1979. The Pompano Beach base is located at the Pompano Beach Airport and features a hangar and separate office building that serves as the operational command center for the pilots, base administrator and public relations specialist.

Goodyear has been using blimps for advertising since 1925, when it launched the first Goodyear Blimp, Pilgrim, and over the past 90 years dozens of blimps of various types have served as “Goodyear Blimps.”

Though blimps played a useful surveillance role in the Second World War, airships today are mostly used for overhead photography at sports events and as massive flying billboards.

In 1925, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company began building airships of the blimp design. These aircraft were used for advertising and military purposes (such as surveillance and anti-submarine warfare) throughout World War II.

The U.S. Navy's ZPG-3W airship - 403 feet (123 metres) long, 85 feet in diameter, with a capacity of more than 1,500,000 cubic feet (42,450 cubic metres) - was the world's largest nonrigid blimp. Four of them were commissioned in 1958. One exploded and crashed two years later, and the Navy retired the others by 1962.

Unlike semi-rigid and rigid airships (e.g. Zeppelins), blimps rely on the pressure of the lifting gas (usually helium, rather than hydrogen) inside the envelope and the strength of the envelope itself to maintain their shape.

Assembly of Wingfoot One began in March 2013 at Goodyear's Wingfoot Lake hangar. An international team of engineers and technicians from Goodyear and Germany's ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik worked side by side to complete the build project.

Through the early 1900's, Goodyear designed and created balloons for competitions, until the first iterations of the iconic blimp, known as B-types and C-types, were created in 1917 for use by the U.S Navy. In 1919, Goodyear started operating its own airship fleet.

Goodyear currently has four 'blimps. ' The first of the new generation fleet, Wingfoot One, was launched in 2014. Its three North American blimps, Wingfoot One, Wingfoot Two, and Wingfoot Three, were built and launched between 2014 and 2018.

blimp, nonrigid or semirigid airship dependent on internal gas pressure to maintain its form. The origin of the name blimp is uncertain, but the most common explanation is that it derives from “British Class B airship” plus “limp” - i.e., nonrigid.