How do they move blimps from city to city?

Type A = rigid (?)

I swear I saw an article in a kids’ magazine about 25 years ago that showed the Goodyear blimp being deflated and packed into a shipping crate about the size of a station wagon, then trucked off to its next gig. Obviously, I have no link to support this.

Possibly that was the Goodyear blimp being packaged for shipment to Europe. They could fly across the ocean, but these designs do not carry enough fuel to do so. They had one there until about 1975 or so. Then nothing there until around 1987-1988. They now have 2 stationed in Europe. They are the new type, made by American Blimp Co., rather than the old Navy designs that were built by Goodyear/Lockheed.

To further confirm the answer to the OP, I live about 20 miles south of the Oakland Colliseum, and one night I saw a Sanyo blimp heading to its next gig, flying low and slow. Very beautiful.

You may be right on the apocryphality of “B-limp”; I hate promoting urban legends of that sort, but I’ll report what I understand to be fact without always validating it. Anyone with a better background in LTA who might have the answer?

By the way, someone with a good background in aerodynamic stress might want to look into an interesting historical anomaly: The rigid dirigibles of the 1920s and 1930s were prone to structural defects that caused crashes (e.g., R-101, ZR-2, Shenandoah, Akron, Macon, Dixmude, Italia). But the two ships with long histories that never had such problems – the Los Angeles and the Graf Zeppelin – were built just after WWI in the one surviving Luftschiffbau Zeppelin fabrication hangar, and their dimensions were forced by that hangar’s dimensions to be longer and narrower than the “proper” way to build a rigid airship – presumably making them less structurally safe from an engineerin POV, although in fact they ended up evidently more so. I’d be very interested in hearing the results of an analysis of why this might have been so.

Dictionary.com doesn’t support the B-limp etymology.

It was National Geographic World, their youth magazine. I remember that same issue quite clearly and was going to mention it.

Quote:
[After Colonel Blimp, a cartoon character invented by David Low (1891-1963).]

Random House Webster’s “Unabridged Dictionary” on “blimp” etymology:

“1. A small, nonrigid airship or dirigible, esp. one used chiefly for observation. 2. Slang. a fat person. [1915-20; of uncert. orig.]”

“Blimp” See Colonel Blimp [1930-35]"

So it appears that use of the word for the airship predates its use for the colonel.

I managed an airport that was a waystation for frequent layovers by blimps. The ground crew would arrive in various trucks and vans from their previous layover point, set up in the infield a large truck (or two) with a heavy-duty towtruck-like booms to which the nose of the blimp would be tethered when it arrived. Sometimes strong headwinds would delay the blimp’s arrival for several hours after the ground crew arrived. Sometimes tailwinds would let it beat the crew there so it had to circle for a while. Then after being moored, a pilot had to stay in the ship and keep the engines running, especially if there were any winds to speak of. They did not fly at night. One time strong winds made it buck and heave wildly and onother time one had to unhook and take off to avoid being tossed onto the ground. The field crew would stay in local motels.

The ‘port was on the way between several of the the blimps’ homeports in Fla., et al, and the huge blimp maintenance hangar in Elizabeth City, NC.

One of more of the “branded” ships would come in and stay for several days and take employees of their local branch factory/office on 1-hour excursions around the area, all-day. Employee appreciation tours. Budweiser and Sanyo among others visited frequently.

I was told that blimps were nonrigid and dirigibles were rigid but the dictionary definition seems to belie that. It defines dirigible as “an airship”, circa 1905-10.

Hope not TMI for OP.

I have seen a blimp with the Monster.com logo in that area several times in recent years…I assumed they were landing at Hanscom. Monster.com’s corporate headquaters is nearby.

The Goodyear blimp would take weveral boxcars, I think. I found this in a real book that chronicles aviation news articles. Sorry no e-link that I know of:
“Aviation Year By Year”, ed., Gunston, Bill, Dorley & Kindersley, (DK), London, 2001, p. 545

“Bedfordshire England March 7, 1956.”

Headline: “Inflatable rubber aircraft takes to air”

“Dan Perkins, engineer at Britain’s Royal Aircraft Establishment, made his first flight today in an inflatable airplane weighing a mere 167 pounds. A rubberized fabric aircraft was brought to the airport at Cardington, deflated and wrapped around its 4-foot propellor and wheel struts in a bundle 14 inches in diameter. Iit took 25 minutes to inflate it using a large domestic vacuum cleaner. Then, with Perkins strapped into the inflatable cabin, the aircraft which has a 6-h.p. engine and a delta wing of 160 sq. ft. mounted on a tricycle frame rose effortlessly into the air and made a smooth touchdown.”

“A smiilar airplane made of rubber coated nylon developed by the Goodyear Aircraft Corp ion the U.S. flew for the first time on February 26, 1956.”

A picture accompanies the story, of a folded up plane on a two weheeled dolly. The photo caption reads, “An inflatabe airplane produced by the Goodyear Corporation in the U.S.”

That item would have fit into a station wagon.

They just go to Blimpie’s.

While LTA craft come under a variety of names, the terms “airship” and “dirigible” (which is short for dirigible [=steerable] balloon) are used to describe all LTA aircraft. It was the tendency in the period 1910-1940 to use “airship” to mean only the big rigids, but that distinction has gone by the boards in the 65 years since. “Zeppelin” properly means a rigid airship built by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, the manufactury founded by Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who invented the rigid airship and built the first one in 1900; it was extended in the WWI period to mean any German war aircraft, there being one or two competitors to LSbZ who also supplied the Reich with airships, though most were Zeppelins sensu strictu.

While all three types of airship look pretty much the same – a cigar shape that floats in the air, with (engines and) a gondola slung athwart the underside of the front end, the interior construction is significantly different.
[list=a][li]A nonrigid (blimp) is nothing but a large, thick-walled balloon of the proper shape, with an attached gondola and, optionally, engines. The only space in which crew, passengers, and/or cargo can be carried is in the gondola. Blimps, of course, are still manufactured for specific uses.[/li]
[li]A semirigid has the same inflatable envelope as a nonrigid, but has a stiff keel running along the underside, which may, if large enough, include a catwalk to enable crew to move along the length of the ship safely while in flight. Semirigids were the vogue in the years surrounding WWI, but rapidly went out of fashion during the 1920s.[/li]
The largest LTA craft are the rigid dirigibles, which are fabric-clad aluminum-alloy frameworks in which are slung inflatable cells – effectively, bulgy-rectangular-solid-shaped balloons. Catwalks and passageways give access to every part of the interior structure that is not occupied by the lifting cells. While most of the interior of a rigid is filled with cells, in order to provide the necessary lift for the giant craft, they were generally provided with some interior passenger/cargo space in the bottom of the envelope, meaning that one did not need the enormous gondolas that would be required if a blimp-style gondola were enlarged to the equivalent dimensions for a 800-900-foot-long rigid airship. The gondola was still present, for two reasons – it provided a bridge for flying the craft, with maximum visibility, and it also was the part which touched down first, thus making embarkation/debarkation easier. But typically an airship’s crew, passengers, and freight were distributed between gondola and interior area. They were immensely popular until the Akron and Macon crashes (mid 1930s) and the Hindenburg explosion (1937). The last three, the German Graf Zeppelins I and II and the American Navy’s Los Angeles, were decommissioned and scrapped early in World War II.[/list]

Just guessing here: The crashed airships you listed weren’t “defective” structurally; they all AFAIK crashed during severe thunderstorms that they were too slow and too low-flying to avoid, and weren’t reliably forecastable in the pre-satellite years anyway. The variations in wind velocity over their huge surfaces, aka wind shear, were so high that no dirigible could be built strong enough to take them and still be able to get off the ground. The long, thin ones might simply have never been subjected to storms that strong. The worst storms in Europe are generally less severe than in North America, perhaps saving the Graf, and in the case of the LA, who knows, maybe it got lucky. Or, it is possible that a lateral wind was able to flow around their narrower bodies more easily, reducing the maximum dynamic pressure in the direction that would bend them along their weakest axis, more than compensating for the greater net moment arm of the applied load.

But again, I’m just guessing.

Oh, all the blimps I’ve seen operate in Boston have used Beverly, not Hanscom. That includes the “Hood Lightships” at Red Sox games. Or maybe I just notice them more because I go near Beverly much more often. I once watched the *Spirit of Akron * set down there, and believe me, that ground crew has a job to do to grab those lines and snag them on the mast truck. The blimp comes in at a very steep angle, too.

This is a trick question, right? Blimps are airships. If a pilot wanted to get from city A to city B, he’d just fly it there. I personally know several airplane pilots. Your question would be basically the same if I contacted one of these pilots about how to get a small private plane from Detroit to Chicago? I guess they could suggest that I disassemble the plane, truck it to Chicago, and reassemble it there. Or they could just quote me a price where they’d fly the plane to O’Hare Airport, and point out how much cheaper of an option this would be. Aircraft are flown from place to place; and NOT transported by ground.

It’s a reasonable question. Plenty of aircraft are transported by ground. The tone of your post would imply that it’s amost unheard of.

I can guarantee you that the Hood blimp I saw was at Hansom. I have never been to the Beverely airport. My brother and I watched for a long time while it was landing and being secured. I have also seen it in the air over western Boston many times going in for a landing in the Hanscom area many other times.

Maybe the choice of airport (do they use Norwood and South Weymouth too?) just depends on the wind that day. With a cruising speed of only 30 knots or so, it could take forever to get back home into the kind of headwind they could see along the coast at 1000-2000 feet or so.

Is there any type of aircraft that commonly and routinely is transported by ground? I would not have thought this was typical if the option of flying the aircraft was available.

Reasonable hypothesis, and it does explain the Shenandoah and Akron crashes. But I consider “structural defect” to imply “thing that caused a craft to break up and crash,” regardless of the circumstances. Obviously nobody expects a Piper Cherokee to fly through a tornado, and the Shenandoah was ripped apart by wind shear in a line squall – after flying successfully through frontal conditions no HTA aircraft of the time could have managed. But the R-101 and the Macon crashed because of actual structural problems – as I recall, the Macon settled gracefully into the ocean after the superstructure on which the flight control surfaces at the stern were mounted just disintegrated, on a sunny day over the Pacific, with all but two or three crew surviving. The Los Angeles, by the way, went through much the same weather conditions as the other three Navy rigids that did break up, and survived in good shape. I don’t attribute that to pure luck.

I’ll grant that weather conditions probably had a lot to do with it – and I wonder if modern technology could build safer airships. Given the amount of fuel it takes to keep an airplane flying vis-a-vis its payload, I suspect the question might be worth researching for air cargo transport and deluxe passenger service.

The R-101 crashed when it hit a church steeple, the Macon in a storm off California.