LEGENDARY
SHIP
Airship
The Slow Giant
“A building that decided to fly.”
Zeppelin, Goodyear & others · private
NO PHOTO
Length
246 ft (Zeppelin NT)
Wingspan
No wings — 65 ft wide (Zeppelin NT)
Max speed
~65 kts
Range
500 nmi
Ceiling
8,500 ft
Engines
3x piston, vectored (Zeppelin NT)
Crew
2
Built
~25 flying today
Nothing else on your radar moves like an airship — a helium envelope longer than a 747 idling across the sky at highway speed. Only about two dozen airships are flying in the whole world, which makes this one of the rarest catches there is.
Fun fact
Goodyear's famous 'blimps' technically aren't blimps anymore — the current fleet are semi-rigid Zeppelin NTs with internal frames, built in Germany.
How to spot one
You will not mistake it for anything else: a giant cigar with a gondola underneath, moving at bicycle-race speed. Usually orbiting a stadium or on an ad route.
Sounds like
A low aero-engine hum that hangs overhead far longer than any airplane — the sound of something in no hurry at all
One might be overhead right now.
Bogey turns the The Slow Giant from a dot in the sky into a card in your logbook. Coming to iOS and Android.
Get Bogey