One Hundred Years of Goodyear: How an American Icon Is Marking Its Centennial

A century ago, on June 3, 1925, a small helium airship named Pilgrim lifted off in the Akron area. It was the first commercial non-rigid airship in the world to use helium instead of hydrogen, the first of Goodyear’s branded fleet, and the start of a public-relations operation that has outlasted entire generations of aircraft, advertising trends, and television technology. Goodyear has spent 2025 leaning into that milestone with a sprawling, multi-pronged celebration: anniversary flyovers, a tour of more than 100 cities, charity auctions, the sale of pieces of an actual blimp envelope, a hangar banquet for the lighter-than-air faithful, and (because why not) a Goodyear-sponsored Ice Cube tour featuring a 1993 blimp-inspired rap lyric flown across the night sky.

For an industry that mostly still works in single-digit fleet sizes, a marketing program with a hundred-year unbroken arc is genuinely remarkable. Here’s how Goodyear has been marking the achievement.

Pilgrim, Wingfoot One, and what counts as a “blimp” in 2025
Goodyear officially anchors the centennial to June 3, 1925, the date Pilgrim took its first flight. To mark the exact hundredth anniversary, the company brought all three U.S.-based airships, Wingfoot One, Wingfoot Two, and Wingfoot Three, home to Akron and flew them together over the city in a coordinated formation, with Wingfoot One wearing a special livery designed to evoke the original Pilgrim. Three Goodyear airships in the same sky at the same time is exceptionally rare these days. The fleet normally operates with each aircraft based in a different part of the country (Wingfoot Lake in Suffield, Ohio; Carson, California; and Pompano Beach, Florida) and on independent schedules covering different sporting events and tour stops. Coordinating all three over the city where the program began, on the exact anniversary day, was the kind of event Goodyear could justify only for a centennial. It was also the visual centerpiece of the entire year, the moment most often pictured in coverage of the anniversary.

A quick technical note for newcomers, because the terminology is where most “blimp” articles start tripping over themselves: a true blimp is a non-rigid airship, meaning the envelope (the large gas-filled bag that provides lift) holds its shape entirely from internal gas pressure, with no structural skeleton. Deflate it and it collapses. Goodyear flew genuine blimps for most of its history. But in 2014 the company began transitioning to the Zeppelin NT (Neue Technologie, German for “New Technology”) platform, which is a semi-rigid design, with a partial internal frame supporting the envelope. Beneath the envelope hangs the gondola, the cabin where the crew and passengers sit. That’s why you’ll see Goodyear’s chief pilot and operations manager Michael “Doc” Dougherty cheerfully telling reporters that “blimp” is no longer technically accurate, while in the same breath insisting the company will always call them blimps anyway. Brand recognition wins over taxonomy. Goodyear’s own marketing splits the difference: “blimp” in the public-facing copy, “airship” in the technical documentation.

The last true non-rigid Goodyear blimp, Spirit of Innovation, was retired in 2017. As of this article’s publication, everything in Goodyear’s current fleet is a Zeppelin NT.

Two airships at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh
EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in late July is the world’s largest annual aviation gathering, drawing around 700,000 attendees over a week. Goodyear flew in Wingfoot One and Wingfoot Two, with Wingfoot Three back home for maintenance, and used the appearance to put the fleet’s history, technical details, and pilot operations in front of a serious aviation audience.

Goodyear proudly displayed the capabilities and specs of its top-of-the-line Zeppelin NTs. The airships are 246 ft (75 m) long, about 80 percent the length of an American football field, and 58 ft (18 m) tall. They cruise at up to 73 mph (117 km/h), have a range of around 486 nautical miles (559 mi or 900 km), and can stay airborne for up to 24 hours when needed. Maximum altitude is 8,530 ft (2,600 m), though they typically work the 1,000 to 1,500 ft (305 to 457 m) range during sporting event coverage. Each airship is powered by three Lycoming IO-360 engines producing 200 hp apiece, with two crew on the flight deck and seating for up to 12 passengers in the gondola.

A major technical achievement Goodyear has been highlighting at events this year is the fleet’s certification, completed in 2020 after joint work with the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency), to fly under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) instead of only Visual Flight Rules (VFR). That clearance allows flight in low visibility, through clouds, and at night using cockpit instruments instead of outside visual references. The older Goodyear blimps were limited to VFR, meaning daytime, clear-weather flying only. Other Zeppelin NT operators, who mostly fly daytime sightseeing trips, never had reason to pursue the certification. That makes Goodyear’s current fleet operations more capable than any other Zeppelin NT flying, and far more versatile than any Goodyear airship that came before it.

The pilots got their share of attention too. Goodyear has 10 full-time pilots across the U.S. fleet. Becoming one requires a commercial certificate followed by roughly 250 hours of training to earn the lighter-than-air airship rating. Chief pilot and operations manager Michael “Doc” Dougherty has 18 years and somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 hours in airships. He compares landing one to docking a sailboat under full sail: you always land directly into the wind, never on a runway, with the ground crew effectively serving as your mooring line.

Topeka, and a coast-to-coast birthday tour
The Oshkosh appearance was part of a broader cross-country anniversary tour that has had at least one Goodyear airship moving from city to city throughout the summer and fall. In early August, the blimp arrived in Topeka, Kansas, where Goodyear’s local tire plant has been running for 80 years. Chief pilot Taylor Deen offered rides to plant employees, a useful reminder that Goodyear airship rides are not commercially available. “I always tell people, you can’t buy a ticket,” Deen told Topeka television station WIBW. The flights are reserved for employees, partners, charity beneficiaries, and the occasional Make-A-Wish recipient.

Asked by WIBW what flying an airship is actually like, Deen described it as “a combination of an airplane, a helicopter and a large boat.” The NT’s propellers can pivot, a setup known as vectored thrust, where the engines themselves swivel to redirect their force. That capability is part of why Goodyear made the platform switch in the first place. Vectored thrust gives the NT airships far better maneuverability than the old blimps, which vastly improves ground handling as well as the aircraft’s ability to hover in place. This can matter a lot for golf coverage, where the camera needs to closely follow the ball and maintain position over a particular green or fairway.

A ride for two, up for auction
For one lucky person, the no-tickets rule had a loophole this year. Goodyear partnered with Bounce Innovation Hub, an Akron-based nonprofit supporting startups and entrepreneurs in northeast Ohio, to auction off a flight for two as part of the nonprofit’s 2025 PNC Startup Showcase. The winning bidder got to choose from any of Goodyear’s three U.S. airship bases. Bidding opened in August at $1,500 and closed September 25, with an anonymous bidder taking the prize for $15,100. Goodyear has reportedly helped raise more than $1.5 million for community nonprofits through similar charity flight donations over the past five years.

A piece of the Spirit, $85 a square
For fans who want something tangible without bidding into five figures, Goodyear is selling pieces of the actual envelope from Spirit of Goodyear, the GZ-20-class blimp that flew across North America from 2000 to 2014. Each piece comes in a yellow-logoed commemorative box and runs $85, with a portion of proceeds going to a new children’s exhibit at the EAA Aviation Museum in Oshkosh. Goodyear has also pledged to donate its last remaining GZ-20-era gondola frame, which was previously used on Europa and later on Stars and Stripes, to the same exhibit.

Spirit of Goodyear has a couple of legitimate claims to history: it’s the longest continuously operated airship in the program’s hundred-year run, and it was the first Goodyear blimp to provide high-definition aerial coverage of a sporting event, Monday Night Football. Its gondola is preserved at the Crawford Aviation Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. Other Goodyear airship components are preserved in several places, including Wingfoot Lake, the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California, and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, which has Pilgrim’s gondola.

Ice Cube finally gets his sign
In 1993, Ice Cube released “It Was a Good Day,” and one of the song’s most-quoted couplets imagined the Goodyear Blimp flying over Los Angeles with the message “Ice Cube’s a Pimp” lit up on its side. The lyric became so culturally embedded that fans spent years half-jokingly trying to make it happen.

In 2014, a fan-driven charity campaign got Goodyear to fly the blimp with messages reading “Today is a Good Day” and “Flying for a Good Cause,” a sanitized version of the lyric tied to a fundraiser for A Place Called Home, a South Los Angeles youth charity. The unedited version finally happened this year’s centennial, when Goodyear announced a sponsorship of Ice Cube’s Truth to Power: 4 Decades of Attitude tour, his first headlining tour in over a decade. The partnership launched at the BIG3 Championship in Orlando on August 24, with a flyover displaying the actual lyric. Subsequent flyovers were planned over tour stops in Denver, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Cleveland.

Goodyear’s vice president for global communications and partnerships, Doug Grassian, framed it as bringing a piece of music history to life. Ice Cube called it a metaphor for “the sky being the limit” finally arriving in literal form. It’s a strange and excellent piece of cultural circular-reference-making: a 1993 song imagined an airship, the airship in question now exists in a different technical category than the one Ice Cube was thinking about, and Goodyear decided to actually do the bit anyway.

The Lighter-Than-Air Society banquet in the hangar
An event specially for lighter-than-air and airship enthusiasts wrapped things up in late September. The Lighter-Than-Air Society, the Akron-based nonprofit and longstanding clearinghouse for airship history, hobbyists, and serious researchers, held its 71st annual banquet inside Goodyear’s Wingfoot Lake Airship Hangar on September 27. The evening was explicitly themed around Goodyear’s centennial and featured a history presentation from a Goodyear airship crew member. Tickets were $65 and capped at 100 guests, with a buffet dinner and a silent auction featuring, among other things, a Goodyear airship ride for two, a golf outing at Firestone Country Club’s North Course, and a piece of girder from the Goodyear-Zeppelin era of the 1920s and 1930s, when Goodyear first teamed up with Germany’s Zeppelin Company.

For more context, the Wingfoot Lake hangar was built in 1917 and is the oldest active airship facility in the country. It got an Ohio Historical Marker in 2018 designating it as the “Kitty Hawk of Lighter-Than-Air.” The first class of U.S. Navy airship pilots trained there. Holding the centennial banquet inside the hangar that watched most of the program’s history happen is the kind of detail that is recognized and appreciated by an airship-literate audience.

A century of persistence
Strip away the marketing and the hundredth anniversary is, quietly, a story about institutional persistence. Goodyear has run this program continuously through the loss of the great rigid airships, recurring helium-supply challenges, wartime expansion and postwar contraction, the obsolescence of the GZ-20 platform, and the full transition to a German-designed semi-rigid replacement. Most lighter-than-air programs since the 1930s have ended in cancellation, bankruptcy, or quiet absorption into something else. Goodyear’s hasn’t. That’s the actual achievement being celebrated, with a flyover and a hangar banquet and, sure, an Ice Cube concert.

Renewed interest and serious development across the lighter-than-air industry mean the next hundred years may look very different from the last. Where Goodyear’s program fits into that is an open question, and one the company will answer on its own schedule. For now, Goodyear still has three U.S.-based aircraft in active rotation, along with its fourth airship based in Essen, Germany, a full pilot roster, and a marketing budget that this year included flying a rapper’s lyric across the night sky. It would be hard to ask for a more Goodyear hundredth birthday than that.

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