My name is Curtis Minter Jr.

I have the privilege of serving as President of Akron Roundtable and also a Senior Fellow.

Thank you for the round of applause.

Senior Fellow of Third Space Action Lab in Cleveland, Ohio.

Really excited for today's conversations, but before we get off on a good foot, I do want to acknowledge the elected officials in the room.

I believe I saw one or two.

If you would stand, please.

Thank you so much, Phil and Sandra, for your service.

We are grateful for you being here.

That said, I would like another round of applause for our title sponsor, that is State and Federal Communications.

Let's give them a hand.

Per usual, we will have Q&A follow our speaker's presentation.

We'll invite at that time Fideria Nicholson, who is a Dean and VP at the University of Akron, to lead us.

To submit a question, please be sure to capture one of the Q&R codes on either of my side.

We have the privilege of using the Asker app, a digital platform for question asking, and is generally sponsored by Greater Akron Chamber.

You may also request a physical note from one of our staff members who will be walking the room near the end of the presentation.

If you all would do me a favor, please pull out your mobile devices.

If you would take a moment, take out your mobile devices and please put them on silent or turn them off so that we can avoid disruption of the forum.

Thank you so much.

And now I'll offer thanks to Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company for underwriting our parking here today.

And at this point, would like to invite their very own Community Affairs and Engagement Director, Joni Fitch, to the stage.

Let's receive her with a round of applause.

All right.

Good afternoon.

All right.

That was quiet.

We're having fun today.

Okay, so thanks for being here.

We really appreciate it.

Akron is the home to many iconic symbols, but few are as recognizable or beloved as the Goodyear Blimp.

For more than a century, it has been part of our skyline, our history, and our community.

That's why I'm excited to welcome you to today's conversation about Akron's favorite unofficial mascot, and the Emmy-nominated documentary that celebrates its story.

Today, we're joined by 2 people who know the blimp and its history better than most: Chief Pilot Michael Dougherty, known to most as Doc, and Katy Robinson, who serves as Social Media Creative Services Manager for Goodyear.

I've had the privilege of knowing both Doc and Katy for many years.

And I can tell you their enthusiasm for the blimp is truly contagious.

You're in for a real treat today.

Doc's story with the blimp started when he was a kid gazing through the window at one of these incredible aircraft.

Years later, he went from dreamer to pilot, learning to fly the very blimp that he had seen as a kid.

Today, he serves as Chief Pilot of Airship Operations and continues to help write the next chapter of blimp history.

Katy brings many talents to her role at Goodyear, and one of her most memorable accomplishments is directing Icon in the Sky, the very reason we're all here today.

Through years of research, interviews, and tracking down every historical blimp clip imaginable, she transformed 100 years of blimp history into an Emmy-nominated documentary, which I hope you all watched, by the way.

And helping bring today's conversation to life is Barry Dunaway.

Many of you know Barry through his broad career in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, including the J.M.

Smucker Company and Leadership Akron, as well as his active community service and role on the Akron Roundtable Board.

What you may not know is that he's also a blimp enthusiast and a longtime friend of Goodyear, and we're thrilled that he is guiding today's conversation.

Thank you all again for being here.

We hope you learn something new, hear a few great stories, and leave with an even greater appreciation of our favorite icon in the sky.

Please join me in welcoming my friends, Doc, Katy, and Barry.

To the stage.

And while they get settled, let's check out this trailer.

Thank you.

You know, you look up at a blimp and we all wonder, what is that?

How's it working?

How does it fly?

How's it staying up?

So there's something I think really unique that people grasp onto.

It's a little bit like a magical unicorn of the sky.

The idea that you could advertise in the sky— people are going to look up.

Pilgrim, which was the first Goodyear commercial blimp, first operated in 1925, and Goodyear blimps are still going on today.

Goodyear and its PR airships really got pushed into the war right after Pearl Harbor.

They really did have a job to do— coastal patrols, looking for submarines off the Atlantic and off the Pacific.

During the game, all of a sudden we heard a lot of noise from the production people, and I looked back at the hill by Candlestick Park and I could see rocks and boulders coming down the side of the hill.

And I thought, holy moly, everything was a mess after the hurricane.

We would flash these messages saying, if you see the red balloon up, go there for medical reasons.

If you see a blue balloon, that's for water.

I wouldn't change his job for anything.

I could tell when they got off the ship that they're going to tell Grandma, Grandpa, Uncle, and Aunts all about their blimp ride and the great pilot they had.

People get emotional about it because it means something to their family.

It reminds you of the past, it reminds you of the present, and it reminds you of the future.

The Goodyear Blimp is iconic, especially at sports events.

It's just a sign that I'm here at this place and this is a special event because it doesn't go to places that aren't special events.

If you don't see the blimp, it ain't that big, baby.

A lot of work has gone into what we're looking at now.

People that are here, the facilities that we have, the equipment, the airship that we're flying, that's all built off of 100 years of other people's work.

Why does this thing strike something in our soul?

I don't know, but it does.

Goodyear better keep it going.

Well, thanks, thanks for that introduction, Joni.

That really set the tone for today's conversation.

You know, this is Akron Roundtable's 50th anniversary, and so this year we've invited Akronites who have gone on to national or international acclaim to be our guest and our speaker this year.

Well, the blimp isn't an individual, but it certainly fits that criteria of going on to have a national and international impact.

If you haven't seen the documentary, hopefully that trailer got you excited to go home and watch it.

I would really encourage you to do that.

Katy, Doc, thanks so much for being with us today.

No better voices to help tell the story of the blimp and its history.

So great to have you here.

So Doc, Joni mentioned that you becoming the chief pilot and head of blimp operations has really been kind of a childhood dream.

Tell us a little bit about how that started to where you are today and what that journey's been like.

Yeah, there's a— the reference that she made there in the introduction was there's a picture of me, for those that are old enough to remember, in 1986, there was a United Way campaign where they opened the air dock hangar doors for the first time in a lot of years.

They had parked a Goodyear blimp in there along with a hot air balloon, which when you see the picture, you see how small they look in that massive hangar compared to what we're used to out at Wingfoot Lake.

But, but I was there with my family, my grandparents, my parents.

And there's a picture of me sitting on my dad's shoulders looking in the windows of the airship that ultimately I would learn to fly on almost 30 years later.

So it was really cool to see that picture.

And actually, just recently I found a YouTube video that somebody took and randomly posted not long ago, like a handful of months ago, that, hey, I found this old video of the air dock opening.

And there's me in his video at the time that my grandma took the same picture of me looking in the— so it's really crazy that 30 years later, I was flying that exact same gondola.

It was called a different name at the time.

It was the America then when I saw it.

It was the Spirit of Goodyear when I learned to fly on it, which is now in a museum in East Cleveland, which makes me feel even older than that.

But yeah, it was something that just kind of stuck with me through time.

So aviation wasn't my first thought in my mind for a career.

I actually started at the University of Akron in engineering and then moved over to Kent State University in flight.

And then ultimately both of those things helped me a ton in the job that I have now because as we transition to these new NTR ships, which really helped to drive the next generation of Goodyear blimp forward.

I got to be part of that kind of design and build process, which I think maybe we'll talk about a little bit later.

But I've used both of those backgrounds that I've had and put them to good use at Airship Operations.█ But it definitely has been a lifelong adventure for me, for sure.

Sounds like it.

So I saw you talking to a table in the back of the room.

I think you forgot a little bit of your history.█ High school?

Yeah, so I'm born and raised here in the Akron area.

I grew up in Green.

I went to St.

Francis de Sales Parish School till 8th grade and then went to Hoban High School, which we've got some Hoban representatives back there.

We also have some St.

V representatives right next to them, so they put the rivalry together back in the back of the room there.

Which is Katy's alum, right?

That's just like our peers here.

We're natural-born rivals.

Yeah.

So we're sitting in the same order that you guys are back in the back of the room and We get along just fine, so you guys can today too.

But I am Akron born and raised and got to stay near home to fly the Goodyear Blimp.

So super cool.

And that's part of the reason actually I tell the story and people think it's funny because I said, well, I went to the University of Akron and was in engineering.

Got to a certain point where I was like, well, if I'm not test driving cars or some one in a million job, I don't know if I want to sit behind a desk for my whole career.

And then I moved into aviation, which pre-9/11 aviation was was a pretty, you know, fluid thing.

People were getting jobs right out of college.

It was a good prospect and things like that.

And then I still ended up in my one-in-a-million job flying the Goodyear Blimp.

So there's, there's fewer of us airship pilots than there are astronauts.█ So, wow, it's pretty cool.

So how do you learn to fly a blimp?

You know, we— most of us know how you learn to fly a plane.

You go to flight school, military background.

How do you learn to fly a blimp when there are fewer blimp pilots than there are astronauts?█ Uh, so we are the blimp school.

I've got a couple of my other instructors over here representing from Goodyear, uh, but there aren't, aren't too many of us.

So the, uh, it's, it's like flying a 747 where you're not usually going to go learn to fly one unless you're going to fly one for a living.

Blimps are the same way.

Uh, the unique part about the airship is it's so, uh, crew-oriented, it's so team and family-oriented, uh, that you really have to— even as a pilot, you have to learn all of the aspects of what the airship does to to be a successful pilot because only half of what you do is flying the airship.

The other half is this kind of stuff or being out there, boots on the ground, helping the crews and things like that.

So it's really important.

And if you get to watch the documentary, Katy did a great job of pulling all of that unique family environment that we have in airships together.

So whether you're a crew person or a pilot, training on the airship is very unique.

The actual pilot training on the airship, we hire folks in that are commercially rated in something else first, airplanes or helicopters or something, and we train you specifically specifically on the blimp.

It's sort of like a type rating specific to our aircraft.

So that process takes us close to a year and usually almost 200 hours of flying in the aircraft because we don't have simulators for the blimps.

There just aren't enough of them to make a simulator worth it.

And we don't train enough to make simulators worth it.

But ultimately, we try to make our program as recognizable to an aviation industry person as possible.

And then we fill in all the unique aspects of actually flying.

So it is fun because when we get a new pilot, for those of us that have been teaching on the airship for a while, we can tell without you telling us whether you flew airplanes or helicopters before in the first 5 minutes we fly with you, because those pilots will make mistakes in opposite directions and none of them is good for the airship.

But it's pretty fun.

It's a very unique thing and it's really cool to see people be able to learn in that.

Such a unique niche of aviation.

That's great.

Thank you.

So Katy, tell us a little bit about your background, your experience, and what you envisioned to come out of this documentary.

How did all that come about?

And what were the skills and backgrounds you had to be able to make this come to life?

Well, at the time that this all started, I was doing social media for the blimp.

So if any of you follow the blimp on Instagram, You know, if you know, you know, and if you don't, you should.

But we have a really fun social media presence.

So I was doing all of that kind of work, and we knew the 100th anniversary of the Airships program was coming up, and we were like, well, what can we do to make this really special?

It's a big deal.

100 years of anything is really rare.

So we wanted to highlight that and do a really special project to highlight it.

So we're like, well, let's make a documentary, and it kind of stemmed from there.

There's a lot of documentaries already about blimps, about the Goodyear Blimp specifically, and we really wanted to make something that was different than anything else that was out there.

And I think for us, the one thing we realized is that we have the story that nobody else can really tell.

We have the insider scoop.

We can do interviews with our crew, with our pilots, with former pilots, former crew.

We found a bunch of blimp fans to be in it.

So it was really kind of this behind-the-scenes look and these personal stories that made it a little bit special.

That's great.

And what, what did you hope the audience would take away from, from this documentary?

As we watch it, what should we leave with?

A warm fuzzy feeling.

Okay.

I got that certainly even just from watching the trailer again.

Yeah, there's something special about the blimp, and I don't know that it's anything that can be explained, but there's just this love for it.

Like, as soon as people see the blimp, they just love it, and we wanted to capture those feelings also with a little bit of history, some fun facts highlighting the crew, all of the work that goes into the blimps, but just the pure love that people have for the blimp.

That's great.

So had you ever produced a documentary before?

I had not.

This is my first documentary, so it was a little bit scary, and having your first documentary being about something so well known was a little intimidating, but it was a lot of fun.

Well, clearly success.

Emmy-nominated documentary, so first time out of the gate.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's quite an accomplishment.

Pretty special for sure.

I think it's fitting.

I learned this when I stopped by to see the kids back there, and we're sitting in the right direction again, but the, uh, the Hoban folks brought their aviation, uh, folks with them, the kids that are involved in CCP and aviation, and on the St.

V's side, they brought all the folks with them that are in media and journalism.

That is— that makes sense.

How many out there from the LTA Society are self-proclaimed helium heads?

There's a couple of you, right?

We got a whole table from LTA Research.

They're also in town, so that's really cool.

Talk a little bit about that.

I just learned that today there is an LTA Society.

And who are they and what do they do?

Well, the LTA Society, they touch groups like ours and LTA Research.

Lighter than air.

We probably have to— Yeah, the LTA stands for lighter than air, but the company LTA Research is also in town.

They're in the Air Dock and out in San Francisco.

We are friendly neighbors with them as well, so it's pretty cool.

But anybody that's involved in lighter than air aviation, the LTA Society is a long-running international society, actually, of folks that are interested in lighter than air aviation, and specifically tends to be grounded in airships more so than balloons and things like that, but it encompasses the whole thing.

And then there's a core group of really blimp fans that we call helium heads affectionately.

And they're all over the place.

And I think we leaned on them quite a bit in the documentary because all you gotta do is leave them an open door for a second and they will come right in and give you all the information that they collect, which oftentimes is more than what we have in the first place.

They were fantastic helpers in this whole process.

So pretty happy.

For sure.

They were a big part of it.

Yep, that's great.

And, and I understand they meet at the MAPS Museum.

That's their meeting place this year?

Yes, they're having their, uh, their annual, uh, international banquet at MAPS, I believe.

But last year, because of our 100th anniversary of the airships, uh, they— we hosted it at the hangar at Wingfoot Lake, which is also a historic place in and of itself.

It's a 110-year-old building.

Uh, we've been building airships there from the very beginning.

It was a Navy base for a short time and then turned back into to Airship Operations.

So super cool history out there as well.

But they move around, generally speaking, sometimes not even necessarily in Akron, but oftentimes in Akron in different areas because it's kind of an Akron-based group for most of their leadership from what I understand.

Makes sense.

Good.

So the blimp celebrated 100-year anniversary in 2025.

The original blimp was the vision of Paul Litchfield, who was the CEO of Goodyear.

So give us a little history of this company that was known for making tires.

How did it, you know, something that runs on the road, how all of a sudden did this blimp come about that is floating through the sky?

What was that evolution like and what was his vision?

So Paul Litchfield, first of all, was a huge sailing fanatic.

He liked boats, he liked the America's Cup, he liked watching the yachts.

So if you look over the course of the more than half of our history at airships, our blimps have been named after America's Cup winners, yacht winners.

So he was very interested in that kind of thing.

So of course in 1925, we'd been building airship parts since 1910, and then 1925 we drew a line in the sand because that's the first time that Paul Litchfield decided that putting Goodyear on the side of one of these giant things would be great for advertising as well, which in itself was genius at the time because that didn't— aerial advertising did not exist back then.

So he invented that.

But he also saw the airships as kind of a personal form of transportation, in many cases like a boat in the sky.

And that's what I still say.

It feels like a boat in the sky when you fly it.

It's not called an airship for nothing.

But he really enjoyed that part of that.

And so he really enjoyed the push into aviation.

He enjoyed that aviation was new at the time.

It was very exciting to folks.

We actually got involved in aviation in general first in balloons.

And then transitioned into airships a little bit later because some of the rubberized fabrics that Goodyear had been making for other applications just happened to be very fitting for application into balloons and airships and things that needed to contain gas because that rubberized coating was what kept the helium or hydrogen in the really early days in the envelope.

So, we were kind of a natural fit for that and then just expanded on on the technology over time in many other ways.

But that was kind of the foot in the door for Goodyear.

But we leaped off of that because especially into World War II, we branched out into airplanes and aircraft parts and all kinds of other things.

Goodyear Aerospace existed for a long time and built parts all over the place.

Really, one of our biggest production of total aircraft is actually the F4U Corsairs that we built under the Vought contract for World War II.

We built 4,100 airplanes.

In the air dock.

So the biggest production line in the air dock was airplanes.

The biggest production for Goodyear was airplanes and not airships.

But we also built 300 airships over time as well, which is one of the largest total manufacturers of airships in the world as well.

So, wow.

Doc is clearly a historian on the blimp.

So I certainly took that— I was going to say, Katy, talk a little bit about— he's not just the chief pilot and head of operations.

He knows the history of the blimp.

So what was that relationship with Doc as you're trying to put this together?

And how did you two work collaboratively?

It was mostly just me asking a million questions.

I think we did a few interviews with you.

We did one off the bat, and then we kind of redid it and focused it a little bit.

But you're probably the best blimp historian I know.

And we also had a couple other outside historians chime in as well.

As you'll see in the documentary, we had Tom Crouch from the Smithsonian, and Eddie Ogden, who was our former PR for the airships.

So they really helped me kind of put all the pieces together for the history.

That's awesome.

So what was your biggest surprise as you're putting this together and you think, I've worked at Goodyear for a while, I've been around the blimp, I've been doing social media.

Any one or two like ahas, like I would have never guessed that about the blimp or its history?

That's a good question.

I think one of the biggest surprises is when we were traveling for a lot of these, how people in other— where our other bases are, how much they love the blimp too.

So we have a base in Pompano Beach, Florida, and then we have one out in LA, and they love the blimp there just as much as we do.

And they're like, no, this is the LA blimp.

And I'm like, wait, but it's the Akron blimp.

They're very possessive of it, just like we are, and that was really interesting and something that I didn't really realize until going to those places.

That was a really fun thing to find out.

That emotional connection.

We all know whose blimp it is.

Absolutely.

We know whose blimp it is, don't we?

But it was cool that they all have that kind of ownership of it too.

It's everybody's blimp.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah.

So, Doc, you mentioned Lighter Than Air.

Last year we had Brett Crozier here, who's the CEO of Lighter Than Air, which is based in the Akron Air Dock out at the old Akron, or the Akron Airport.

And Brett talked about using lighter-than-air technology for things like hospitals and telecommunications and other innovative ways of using lighter-than-air craft.

Talk about the San Francisco earthquake and the— was it the flood?

Andrew?

Hurricane Andrew in Florida.

We saw little snippets of that in the trailer, but I think it gives us an indication of when Brett talks about how blimps can be used?

And maybe just give those examples of how the blimp and Goodyear played a key role in both of those events.

Yeah, I mean, the blimps are embedded in the communities in lots of different ways.

And we try to be— we call them aerial ambassadors.

We try to be good friendly neighbors to everyone around.

And of course, everybody for the most part loves a blimp.

So we lean into that.

But we're also a part of the— disaster relief and kind of ERP programs in each of the communities that we live in as well.

So we've done all kinds of things around the country.

Some of the most notable ones are the 2 that you mentioned there.

We've done just simple surveys of things like the Cuyahoga Valley for the National Park Service and a few things like that.

But specific to those 2 events, the first one in San Francisco, we just happened to be there, and it was the earthquake, the World Series earthquake.

So you were telecasting World Series?

We were telecasting World Series, yep.

And we were over the stadium when the earthquake happened.

But they immediately transitioned us from being in aerial coverage for sports to disaster relief and kind of direction from the sky because we were the only thing in the sky.

It wasn't quite as normal back then to have a slew of news helicopters flying all over the place, even in areas like San Francisco and LA.

So we were one of the only things flying.

And the airships are capable of flying for a long time.

So on a typical TV mission like that one, they would have been perfectly prepared to fly for somewhere between 6 and 8 hours.

And they were probably 3 and a half or 4 hours into a game and easily had 4 to 5 hours of flight time still available to them.

And because we already had a downlink set up with all of our TV gear that was feeding into CBS, which was a national broadcast at the time, which then could be shared with lots of other things, including police and fire and rescue, other networks, police departments and things like that.

So they were able to split those off.

And then they were asking the blimp to go to certain places.

Hey, what do you see over here?

What do you see over here?

Are there lights on on this side?

Is it worse here than over here?

So the blimp was really kind of giving direction in that scenario to try to help those first responders on the ground be where they needed to be in a priority list of order.

Kind of a unique application.

They ended up keeping us there for the next several days and flying us multiple hours a day several days after the fact to do the same thing and just information gather for us.

So super unique use for the airship.

And then not too many years later, I think it was '94 maybe, '93, '92 when Hurricane Andrew in South Florida, and we live, again, we live in South Florida.

That's a home for us.

Pompano Beach is near north side of Fort Lauderdale.

So that was right at home.

The airship happened to be in New York when that happened.

And actually, we got a call from the federal government.

The president, I think, actually called our CEO and said, hey, can you guys go back down to Florida and help us with this stuff?

So that was what you saw, that little clip of him saying the blue balloons and the red balloons and those types of things.

So they set up a ground support network, but they didn't have a way to get the information out because if you didn't have a radio with batteries, you wouldn't have any way to communicate because there was no communications, there was no TV.

There was no broadcast.

There was nothing because the whole southern half of the state got wiped out.

So the airship was able to fly with the LED sign on the side and just put messaging across in multiple languages that said, if you need help, go to these places.

So the blimp was super effective in that because we could stay aloft for lots of hours at a time flying over masses of people that were confused and scared and all kinds of things.

So it was really a unique use of the airship.

But that's something that Goodyear has always kind of jumped at.

Not because we want to, but because we're there and we can, and it's the right thing to do in the communities that we live in.

So regardless of where we're at, we've been involved in everything from, you know, fun surveys to those types of things and everything in between in our community.

So, wow, really innovative use of the blimp in those 2 situations.

So for something to be successful for 100 years, you have to continually innovate.

And so from the 1925 Pilgrim to the 3 airships we saw last year that were up in the sky.

Talk a little bit about the innovation and what's changed from over those 100 years in terms of the blimp, flying it, the technology, and so forth.

Katy, you obviously jump in.

I'll probably let Doc handle this one, but I mean, a lot has changed from 1925 to now.

I bet.

Yeah, almost everything really, especially once we got the new NT airships, because that was transition that even us within Airship Operations, we leaned on our 90 years of experience, I think, more than we were hoping to lean on our 90 years of experience more than we were able to because the 2 models were just designed in a completely different method.

They were— we had been flying almost the same type of technology up until 2016.

And then when we made that transition over, the technology was so different from a flight standpoint, flight controls, the aircraft itself, to the ground support, everything, including, you know, we thought we couldn't get ballast wrong, right?

Ballast is just weighted bags, and they were 25 pounds at a time, and we put little steel balls in there, and it was— but what we found out was that in Germany, they were still using lead, and lead is much heavier than steel.

So the ballast boxes on the aircraft itself were built smaller than the ones that we had here in the States, and so we couldn't fit our 25-pound shot bags in there.

There anymore.

So we had to come up with a unique idea.

And obviously lead is frowned upon here and it's a dangerous substance.

And so we either had to find something to coat it and still use, or we had to use tungsten, which was like $2 or $3 million in dead weight, which we're like, we can't afford to do that.

So we got creative and we went back to the drawing board even on things like just dead weight.

So we say the only thing the same between the old airships and the new is the helium that goes inside, and that is about it.

It did take us quite a bit of time to transition to that new type.

And it's just that catching up with innovation along the way.

But even within the old airship, we made huge leaps forward in engine technology, in LED sign.

We started with incandescent, then neon for a while, fiber optics we tried.

We went back to incandescent for a little bit, and then first generation LED.

It's probably been about 20, 25 years ago now.

And then the newest version of the sign is is a simpler, lighter weight, but higher intensity LED.

And we're now currently looking into what the next generation is.

And we're not 100% sure.

It might be another version of LED.

It might be lighted film.

It might be projection.

I don't know.

So there's lots of different ideas, but we're still kind of driving in that.

We were drivers of television technology.

We were the first ones to do broadcast from the air in 1955.

We were the first ones to go HD in 2003.

And now we're currently running native 4K so we can feed down a stream right to internet streaming services like YouTube or Prime or something like that in their own format, which is great.

So we continue to just kind of stay on the cutting edge of that as well.

We've also done cool things in the blimp which you can't do in airplanes and helicopters and other competitors of ours, which we call a megacast, where we can actually put talent in the airship and they can be looking out the window.

So you see a camera shot of them with the game in the background, having a conversation in the blimp like news sportscasters would.

But then you're also getting the feed from the blimp of the stadium itself, and you're doing that all at the same time.

So especially to streaming service, you can get like a split panel where you're seeing inside the blimp, the view that I see as a pilot kind of, and then the shot from the blimp and the regular on-air broadcast.

So it's really cool, the types of things that we've kind of over the years with the airship from simple lighting to the airship itself to the TV technology and everything in between.

That's fascinating.

I think for many of us, we just look up and see this big thing floating in the sky and have no idea all of its capabilities and the engineering that's gone into making that capable.

That's incredible.

So quick lesson, we all call it a blimp, but it's not.

It's a semi-rigid aircraft.

Is that right?

Secret's out.

Secret's out?

Secret is out.

But it's so much easier to say blimp.

So Goodyear Semi-Rigid Airship just doesn't have the same ring to it.

No, it doesn't.

Doesn't roll off the tongue.

No.

What's the difference?

And when did that change happen?

So there's a lot of— we can have a vocabulary lesson really quick.

So a lot of people say, well, it's a dirigible or it's not.

So dirigible is like saying automobile.

Dirigible just means steerable balloon.

So that's the most generic thing that you can say.

A blimp specifically is kind of a— it's actually a slang term for a non-rigid airship.

Non-rigid just means that the envelope can be sucked completely flat on the floor when there's no helium inside and there's no structure to help hold it up.

So in our older airships, if you were to pull all the helium out, it would just be a bag laying on the floor and then the fixed gondola laying next to it.

With a semi-rigid airship, you do have a framework inside.

But in our case, a semi-rigid just means it's not full rings with a coating on the top.

So if we were to suck the helium out of ours, it would be this funky diamond shape.

All the aerodynamics would go away.

You can't get it completely flat on the floor because there is internal structure.

And the reason for the structure is that we can hook all this stuff up to it, like the gondola, the fins, the landing gear, all hooks into the structure.

So it does make it— it gives it a level of safety factor that that you might not have in the non-rigid airships to where if you were to lose pressure, it might look funny.

But as long as you have enough lifting gas inside to stay in the sky, then you still have controllability.

█ Where the old airships, you became a free balloon, which was also fine.

We trained for that.

It's not ideal, but it can be done.

Where when you have a full rigid airship, that's what the LTA folks are working on.

And that's where you have a ring structure with an aerodynamic skin on the outside for flying.

And then you have cells inside with your lifting gas.

And so it's a completely different concept flying a rigid airship versus any of the other types.

All of the other types are considered pressure ships, which means you need the pressure to maintain the shape, aerodynamics, and the flyability of the aircraft.

And so the semi-rigid and rigid airships have often been called Zeppelin, but that's like saying Ford technically.

Zeppelin is a manufacturer, and it's just become synonymous.

With the rigid or framed airships of some sort.

So ours actually is a zeppelin.

And in our case, that's right on both the frame side and the manufacturer side.

But it's not necessarily how people use the term all the time.

So zeppelin became like Learjet.

Every small jet was a Learjet for a long time because it's what everybody knew.

And then people found out there's other manufacturers of small jets.

And that's— so you get away from some of those names.

The naming structure starts kind of super broad and then gets very narrow.

In our case, we're never going to stop calling it the Goodyear Blimp because it's always been the Goodyear Blimp.

And regardless of what type of aircraft we fly, it will be a blimp to Goodyear and to all of us flying it.

So technically, for those purists, it is not a blimp, but we're willing to overlook that in this case.

So all those LTA Society members appreciate, really appreciated that conversation, but we can still call it a blimp.

Absolutely.

Okay, good.

Katy, you interviewed a lot of people for this documentary.

50-plus people for this project.

A lot of employees, former employees.

Talk about those interviews and just kind of, was there a theme that ran through that in terms of people who worked directly with the blimp?

I think some of my favorite interviews were the retired crew and pilots because they still come back and they have so many stories, and that was such a big part of their lives.

And I think the recurring theme we would get a lot was it's not just a job, it's a lifestyle.

And it really is, and it still is.

I mean, the crew to this day, they still all travel together.

Everyone knows each other's families.

It's, it's really like one big family, and it's— it was really cool to see that side of it because looking from the outside, you don't necessarily know how much goes into operating the blimps.

So that was something I think really powerful that able to feature in the film.

Also the pride that came through that they had this direct association with something as iconic as— I would say most of our crew are also helium heads, as we say.

Okay.

You have to have a real passion and love for it.

Yeah.

And, you know, a lot of them, when you're in, you're in for a long time.

Sure.

Yeah.

So you talked about a little— we touched a little bit on your other locations.

So you have your headquarters here at Wingfoot Lake where where your operations are based, and then a base in Florida and California.

So talk a little bit about why those locations and what role do those locations serve in terms of what the overall blimp's role is in— for Goodyear?

Yeah, I mean, same role they serve here in Akron, aerial coverage, passenger flights, advertising.

It kind of gives us a way to hit all parts of the country with having one out in California, one in Florida, one here.

We can kind of get anywhere we need to get with those 3 locations.

National coverage.

Okay.

Yep.

And occasionally we'll get all 3 in town, as you saw last year.

Yes, you brought them to Akron for, for the 100th anniversary.

Yes.

Yeah, that was a big deal.

That's a rare event, so it was really cool to see them all together.

So what are those logistics like to get all 3 blimps in one place?

So we joke about this internally that it's fun to get the blimps together for about a week and then it's chaos and you want everybody to go home because it's a lot of work.

Each blimp travels with about 20 people, so it's quite a production.

Yeah, it's a lot of production.

So when you get 20 people times 3 in the same room together trying to coordinate a flight of 3 airships— so first of all, when we were doing the formation flying, we were lucky to have a former Air Force pilot who just recently retired actually, but he did a lot of work to put together a formation program for us.

So when you talk about training, that's a whole other level of things.

And so we had a basic air show training because there's a handful of us that do air shows like Props and Pistons or the Cleveland Air Show, Oshkosh every year, stuff like that.

But formation flying for the sake of formation flying is pretty different.

And in a blimp, it's very different because of the way that they move around in the sky and they move on currents like a boat in the water that you can't see.

So it's very unique.

And so we were lucky to have him help us put that And we still use that today.

We have a special checklist we run for formation flying and things like that.

But we would do a crew briefing on what the mission was for the day, the order the airships were going to launch, how they were going to— which one needed to be fueled to what, where, and where they were going to park at the end of the night and all that kind of stuff.

Because everything had to be exactly in the same place.

Because even at Wingfield Lake where we have lots of room, if you didn't park them in exactly the right spot, if the right wind or lack of wind came, the tails come together.

You got to make sure they're clear each other.

'Cause bumper blimps is not good.

So all of those logistics were planned down to the nut and bolt detail.

So that just took a lot between the operations team, my team, the crew chiefs, and then of course the mechanics that come in behind.

Because when we park them, then the mechanics go to work and they had to make sure that all the stuff was done in the right order, the scheduled maintenance.

If anything was broken that day, the pilots would write it up and the mechanics did a great job of making sure it was ready to go by the morning the next day.

So a ton of logistics in the background.

And then besides that, we would prep for the day with the whole team of 60 or 70 people in a room.

And then we would move to a smaller briefing room with probably about 20 of us because it was all of the pilots.

And then we had a chase helicopter a few times for the stuff that we did and logistics stuff on the ground.

And then we had Katy and her team running to different areas so we could get shots of the Blimps with corporate headquarters and Stan Hywet Hall and all the other things that we wanted to be able to see.

And then I think Jessica is out there too.

She rode in the helicopter and got lots of aerial views of us from that standpoint.

So we ended up with some great shots.

But all of those logistics had to be planned.

And from a pilot standpoint, all that has to be briefed and deconflicted and make sure that everybody knows who's the order, what are the callouts going to be, where can the helicopter go and not go, who needs fuel when, when do we have to be back for this other stuff.

So just a ton of stuff to make those handful of days work for us, but it was really fun.

It was super cool.

And you did it.

Success.

It was very successful.

So how many people are part of the Blimp Operations team?

We have about 80 of us on the airship side, so not including Katy's team in Creative Services.

They're their own department.

They do a lot of other work for Goodyear besides just airship stuff, which is really cool too.

They've done a ton of stuff for racing, which has been beautiful lately.

But the airships team is about 80 folks, and that includes our leadership team, our maintenance control and repair station on the maintenance side.

And then that also— we have our own broadcast technicians that do all of our TV work for us.

We have all of our own pilots.

There's about 13 of us.

That's a full staff because there's 4 on each team plus me.

And then all of our crew chiefs, our general crewmen, ground support mechanics that take care of all of our fleet vehicles and all that kind of stuff.

So everybody comes together for launch and land, works together as kind of one big team.

And everybody's got specialized jobs within the organization.

So each group of operators is a group of about 20, and then everybody else is leadership and maintenance.

And even within those 20, we have 3 to 4 aircraft mechanics assigned to the airship that travels and does all the fieldwork with us.

So basically, if we can get aviation fuel for the airship and water for ballast, we can send the crews on the road for a month plus and be wholly self-sufficient.

So I kind of preach that we're like Goodyear's version of the Blue Angels, right?

We're out to build brand and sell tires and do it in a way that looks really good to everybody else.

So we try to keep things super standardized and, you know, planned to the T and get the guys out in the field looking good.

So I think we do a pretty good job.

Yep, clearly you do.

We're gonna go back to that comment you were making, Katy, about whose blimp is it.

Let's play this next clip from the documentary if we could.

The blimp's almost like a mascot of LA.

I guarantee you probably 99% of Angelenos think the blimp is our thing and it only exists here.

I feel like LA wouldn't be the same without the blimp.

Walking up to it, it is just this presence and this LA icon that you feel like you are approaching.

It is a really unique experience.

We're Pompano, we're Pompano people, and the Pompano Blimp is ours.

Every city has something, but the blimp is ours and it's iconic.

I'm 57 years old.

and we still stop and say, "Look, there's the blimp."

That's when you know something's really cool to your community.

Sorry, Ohio, but it's ours.

We're members of this Palm Beach Sailing Club, and when you're out in the water out there, you see it a lot of times going north and kids regattas and things.

Whenever you're outside, you see it.

It's kind of hard to miss.

The blimp belongs to Akron.

Period.

End of story.

It's cool that it's there.

It's cool that it's in Florida.

They belong here.

I think the blimp means a lot to Akron.

It's our own national treasure, along with some other ones that we have from Akron.

But I think that to see all of these major events all around the world and to see that the blimp is a part of those and to know that, you know, we're just from this little town in Ohio and we could drive up the street and see these amazing monstrosities.

Well, we are very possessive.

I mean, when I say we, I lived in Ohio for a long time and I went to school in Akron.

So the blimp is everything to us.

To me, it just, it just means home.

That's what the blimp means to me, to have it in Akron.

It's just home.

We're at the headquarters of blimp happiness.

That's great.

Anything else to add to those comments?

No, I just love hearing everybody.

Yeah, but let's make it clear.

It's Akron.

It's Akron.

It's Akron.

Okay.

I'm from Akron, so I'm allowed to say that.

Fair enough.

That's great.

Well, Goodyear is incredibly generous offering blimp rides to charities to auction off for fundraising, and just thank you.

Thank you for the support.

I we had the fortune of bidding and winning.

We haven't gone up yet, but I'm looking forward to that.

But I'd be curious.

For each of you just to share, to close our Q&A before Federica comes up, any memorable blimp ride either that you've had personally or someone who's been in the blimp, something that's just left this impression with you that you said, I'll never forget that the rest of my life.

That's a hard one because there's been a few.

Getting to make this film, I got to go up quite a few times, but I think my favorite was we got to fly over San Francisco.

If you've seen the film, you'll see some shots from over the San Francisco Bay, and it was just the most beautiful day out.

It was— I didn't think this flight was going to happen because it was like San Francisco's first tornado warning in 10 years.

Like, the weather was terrible, and it was so windy.

I was driving down, I'm like, this flight's not going to happen.

I went to Starbucks.

Like, I'm down the road getting coffee, and I'm like, I'm just ready to drive back.

And then Doc texts me, he's like, oh, I think we're going to go.

Get over here.

And I'm like, oh shoot, okay, let's go.

And it ended up being just the most beautiful flight.

It was just you and one of our other pilots and me in the back.

So I had the whole blimp to myself, which is something really privileged to be able to do.

And we did some beautiful shots of it over San Francisco.

And then we got to fly back.

It was about a 2-hour flight back to the airport that the blimp was based at.

And got to watch the sunset over the Pacific from the blimp.

It was just a really magical one for me.

Well, for an Emmy-nominated documentarian, you deserved that flight, Katy.

Thank you.

Yep, you did.

Doc, how about you?

Yeah, for sure.

That one was definitely fun.

When you see the ones with the bridge, that was awesome.

That was a cool flight.

I mean, especially from a charity perspective, we've flown lots of Make-A-Wish folks and things like that.

Those are always pretty special because you're making a difference for a family going through a really rough time.

That— those are usually pretty special to me.

Just from generically a passenger flying experience, I got to fly Captain Sully and his first officer Jeff Skiles at Oshkosh, which was really cool.

I also got to fly Commander Jim Lovell there, and that was super cool because he was 80-something at the time.

He just passed away a couple years ago, I think, but he was 80-something at the time.

He hopped right up the steps, right in.

We got up and flying, and I put him in the right seat, and he asked more good questions than most of our student pilots do.

And then he got done with this conversation, which was really cool anyway, and he turns around, he hands his phone to his friend, he says, you got to take a picture because my son will never believe I was in the blimp.

And I was like, well, you've been to the moon and back or whatever.

But it was really cool to see how a person like that reacts to what we do for a living and just that uniqueness.

And this, this guy that's done everything in aviation just being a kid again.

And that, that to me is something that only the blimp can do.

So that That was probably one of the coolest things.

And then that was reinforced just this year at Oshkosh and not even with a ride.

I was standing next to a lady and her husband and they were watching it take off.

And at Oshkosh, you can get closer to the blimp than normal just because it's an aviation event and we try to cordon off and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

But this lady walked right up next to the mast truck.

So I was like, okay, this stuff's going to move.

I better be next to these people to help escort them around.

So she's like just nonstop in my ear the whole time and I'm just kind of moving them around, keeping them safe as the crew is working and doing their thing.

And so she's getting more and more excited as it's getting ready to go.

And then I'm like, okay, here they go.

And they, you know, they come off the truck, they start backing up, the truck drives away and she gets really excited like this and, oh my gosh, this is so cool.

This is the coolest thing I've ever seen.

It's so beautiful.

And then the ship takes off like this and she looks at me and she holds my arm and she just cries.

And I was like, That's kind of crazy because it's something I hadn't experienced before, but like they said in the video, the emotion that it creates for people was just unique.

And I just hadn't— I don't think of it because a lot of times I don't even watch it take off anymore.

It goes over my head like this, and well, it's another day at work.

But for somebody like that, it's the coolest thing they've ever seen, and that was impactful.

That's great.

Thanks for sharing those very special stories.

Well, I've enjoyed the conversation.

Fadiri is going to come up and take some Q&A from the audience.

So thanks, this has been a real privilege, and again, congratulations on the film.

Thank you.

I'm excited for these questions.

Well, we received almost 40 questions, so unfortunately I won't have an opportunity to ask you all 40, but I do have a few selected.

Katy, where can we see the documentary?

Yeah, it's on— if you go to PBS Western Reserve's website, it's right there.

Check your program as well.

There's a link to it on there, but it's on PBS's website.

Thank you.

Can you see people on the ground waving to you from their yard as you're flying over?

Is that possible?

Absolutely.

And they can see us waving back.

We're not very high, so wave when you see us.

We'll wave back to you for sure.

Can you give us a general idea of how long it takes for a blimp to travel to a location For instance, how long would it take for the blimp to fly from Akron to maybe go over an Ohio State game in Columbus?

So that's— it takes approximately the same amount of time to get the blimp somewhere as it does for you to drive.

And because the crew has to drive for us to land on the other side, we generally split the crew in 2 pieces.

We have an advance team with an extra mooring truck out ahead of us.

And if they leave an hour early, by the time we come in, we prepare, we do our preflight, we get the ship ready, and we launch.

They're about 2 hours ahead.

And we fly in a straight line at about 55 to 65 miles an hour, and they drive at 70 like this, and they stop for lunch.

And we get there within half an hour of each other.

So a Columbus flight, for example, we would normally plan for about 2 to 2.5 hours from Akron for the flight portion of the time.

And then if we do a game down there or something, that's a whole other story because the game itself is probably 5.5 to 6.5 hours of flying.

And we have round-tripped that before, but it's a long day when you round-trip an Ohio State game.

But thank you, Katy.

This question is for you.

What is it like to innovate a social media platform for the blimp?

And where do you gather inspiration from?

And what does your team look like?

Well, that's a great question.

Thank you to whoever asked that one.

It's— we get inspiration from everywhere.

We're The Blimp, I would say, is very trendy.

She's always hopping on the latest trends on TikTok, trying to find things relatable to people.

And for me, it was a really special thing to be a part of.

It wasn't really what I came to work for Goodyear at.

I didn't come in to do social media.

It just kind of happened that way.

And we wanted to build up the Blimp social media presence.

So we kind of started off slow, giving people a little bit of insider information about the blimp, and then it slowly evolved into the blimp became its own personality on social.

And that was, that was just really fun to be a part of.

And now, you know, we get so many comments and people asking questions, and they just, they love seeing the blimp on social because the blimp can only get to so many places at a time, but online you can see the blimp anywhere, and that's something really special.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Now that you have this significant documentary under your belt, would you be interested in doing another documentary for the blimp or maybe with a different focus still related to Akron and Goodyear?

Yeah, I haven't, I don't have any official plans for anything at the moment, but personally I would love to do a documentary about the USS Akron and the USS Macon, which were the 2 ships that Goodyear built in the air dock.

I think that would be really interesting.

But still in the very, very early phases of thinking about that one.

That's a pet project for me.

That's a pet project, yeah.

I'm still trying to talk her into doing them, making what we made into an hour with these 50 people's worth of interviews into a— It could be a docuseries probably.

A docuseries or something like that, yeah.

'Cause there's— Hundreds of hours probably of footage.

I think we have the next documentary in the making.

All right.

What is the longest the Goodyear blimp has ever been airborne And what is the furthest it has flown?

That's a great question.

We're capable of being airborne for close to 24 hours under the right conditions.

The longest that I have personally ever been airborne, and talking to most of the other pilots, has been between 14 and 14.5 hours.

I've been— so when we're talking about how long does it take to get somewhere, that depends completely on wind.

And in this case, it was twice that it happened to me.

One time was from Akron to Louisville.

Louisville in the old airship, which was a little slower than this one in the first place.

We just had a bad headwind and we had single-digit ground speeds going all the way there.

And it took 14 hours.

And that was a really long day.

The other one, we were going from central Pennsylvania, Williamsport area, to Boston.

It was one of the first times that we had done a real long cross-country with the new ship.

And our ground support was limited.

The crew was still learning.

The pilots were still learning.

We had a bunch of us in there that day.

It was supposed to be like a 6-hour flight, and then one of the trucks broke, and then the crew got lost, and then they made it to Boston and they got in traffic, and then they couldn't get on the airport once we got to the airport.

And so all of the pilots are just like, oh my gosh, get me out of here, because it's been 14 hours of flying is a long time to be even in the blimp.

So that is a long time.

What fuels the blimp?

And you know, you're able to fly, you're capable of flying up to 14 hours.

Have you ever gone overseas?

So 2-part question.

What fuels the blimp and have you ever gone overseas?

So I've crossed the Great Lakes multiple times.

That I know of, since the Navy days, we have not been overseas with an airship since the Navy days.

But that's what they did in the Navy during World War II was fly back and forth across the ocean.

They were able to be serviced by the boats they were supporting.

So that made a big difference.

In modern-day airship, especially for PR reasons, I have flown in Europe and I have flown here.

but I have not flown from here to there because that would be a huge logistical undertaking.

I've done some homework on it for publicity before to going to the islands or going to northern route over to Europe or something.

So I know that it can be done.

It just has not.

And I have not done that.

But I have flown on both sides of the ocean in the N.T.

airship.

All right.

Thank you.

One more question.

Last question.

You mentioned, Doc, that one of the retired airships is in a museum in the Cleveland area.

Where is that located, and is it open to the public?

It is.

It's the Crawford Auto Aviation Museum on the east side of Cleveland.

I don't know the exact address of it, but you can look it up.

There's a gondola there that's the Spirit of Goodyear.

It's a world record holder gondola that's in Crawford.

That's the one that I learned to fly on, so it's pretty unique to me.

But, but they have a, they have a lot of different things.

It's a— because it's an automotive and an aviation There's a good combination of things.

We have one of our gondolas that is at Plains of Fame in Chino in California.

So if you're from out that way, you can see one down there.

The Smithsonian has a couple of the old World War II gondolas here and there.

I believe there's one in the Smithsonian in downtown D.C., and then I think there's one in the Pensacola Naval Museum that they have a really good restoration of the Ghost Car and the K-Ship down there, I think.

And our pilots just found one of the K-Ships or ZPGs or something in the middle of the country that we were unaware of until just recently.

But that was pretty cool.

And then we donated a gondola to EAA, which is the Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh.

And ultimately, it will probably be about a 5-year project.

But their idea for that is to make it a retro mod where they're partially restoring the gondola and partially turning it into something interactive because they're going to make it the centerpiece of their kids' part of their Aviation Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which is also a Smithsonian-class museum.

It's wonderful there.

So there are places that you can go to see the history of the airships.

It's really cool.

Thank you.

Let's give them another round of applause.

Thank you.

At this time, I'm going to welcome our president, Curtis Minter, back to the podium.

Thank you.

As you know, we are afforded this opportunity give special gifts to folks in partnership with Don Drumm, a legendary artist who is notable here in the great city of Akron and around the world.

And we are fortunate enough to feature his daughter, Leandra Drumm, artist of Don Drumm Studios and Gallery, who will be accompanied by gallery and alum— aluminum, excuse me, manager Tony Bilchek next month, as noted.

Please make sure to be present for our Signature Series luncheon, which will be held on Wednesday, October 14th.

That is a special date, Wednesday, October 14th, at the Hilton Akron Fairlawn.

And so we hope that you all are present for that event.

And also be sure to tune in on television, radio, and also on the web.

Those locations are prescribed in your brochure.

And for more information about Akron Roundtable, please be sure to visit our website at www.akronroundtable.org.

With that being said, I'd like to give a special shout out to our Board Emeritus Barbara Feld, who is also present with— here today.

Let's give her a round of applause.

And that brings our presentation here today to a close.

Thank you so much for being here.

Have a great Thursday.

This has been a production of Akron Roundtable, PBS Western Reserve, the University of Akron, and Ideastream Public Media.