An airship is something that can capture the hearts of everyone, regardless of whether they care about aviation or not. There’s just something amazing about a giant cigar-shaped cylinder gently floating through the sky that gets everyone to look up. If you’re in America, I have good news, because there are at least seven airships flying above American cities. It’s been a decade since you last had this good a chance at seeing a blimp in the wild.
This news comes to us from an Instagram Reel of Alex Dainis, PhD. Dainis typically produces fascinating and approachable videos about science, but she also frequently takes detours to nerd out about blimps. I can’t even blame her. I got to take my first-ever ride in a Goodyear Blimp back in the summer, and it was a truly unforgettable experience.
But even if you cannot score a ride in one of these majestic airships, just seeing one is also really awesome. The great news about that is that there are at least seven blimps that you can see floating around America right now! If you’re a blimp fan, get excited, because it’s been a long time since there has been this much blimp-age!
Goodyear’s Wingfoots
The first three airships that you can see flying around America right now are Goodyear’s trio of advertising airships, N1A ‘Wingfoot One‘, N2A ‘Wingfoot Two‘, and N3A ‘Wingfoot Three‘. Now, I wrote a detailed story about the history of the Goodyear Blimp (the word “blimp” is capitalized here because that’s how Goodyear markets its airships), and you can read about that by clicking here.
I’ll get this out of the way right now and remind you that Goodyear’s blimps aren’t real blimps. All blimps are airships, but not all airships are blimps. A blimp is a non-rigid airship, one where the shape of the envelope is maintained by the lifting gas. The Goodyear Blimp used to be a real blimp, but since 2014, Goodyear has been flying Zeppelin NT (Neue Technologie) airships by Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik. These airships are actually semi-rigid as they employ an internal 12-rib framework that helps maintain their envelopes’ shape and allows the engines to be mounted high.
However, Goodyear still calls these blimps because “Goodyear Blimp” is an outrageously strong brand name. Anyway, here’s what I wrote about where Goodyear’s airships currently live:
Goodyear says that its first Zeppelin NT, Wingfoot One, was built in 2014. Its next sibling, Wingfoot Two, was built in 2016. Finally, Wingfoot Three was built in 2018. Wingfoot One is stationed near Akron, Ohio, while Wingfoot Two lives near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Wingfoot Three is stationed near Los Angeles, California. There’s also a fourth blimp that Goodyear operates that’s stationed in Germany.
Goodyear’s airships don’t just stay in one place. They are known for flying across America to different events. Goodyear brought Wingfoot One and Wingfoot Two to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2025 to celebrate 100 years of Goodyear airships. I was honored to be a guest aboard Wingfoot One.
What’s really cool is that Goodyear publishes a schedule for its airships, so you can figure out if there will be one flying near you. Click here to check it out.
Alright, so that leaves us with the other four. Who else is flying a blimp right now?
Advertising Blimps
One airship is registered as N614LG. This airship is a 2002 American Blimp Corporation A60R, and it flew from Tennessee to California. Currently, it can be found floating around Los Angeles, advertising the film Marty Supreme. The American Blimp Corporation has been around since 1987, and, true to its name, makes real non-rigid blimps. The A60R, which has been in production since 1989, has two engines, seats five in its gondola, and has a 69,000 cubic foot envelope.
N614LG is owned by Skyship Services, Inc., in Windermere, Florida. This is a full-service airship company providing airships for advertising, surveillance, and other uses.
The airship was previously owned by Lighter than Air (LTA) Research, which is based in Akron, Ohio, Mountain View, California, Sunnyvale, California, and Gardnerville, Nevada. LTA’s whole deal is to develop next-generation zero-emission airships to speed up disaster response in areas that are unreachable by boats or fixed-wing aircraft.
N157LG (above and below) is an American Blimp Corporation A-1-70G, and Skyship Services owns this one as well. This one is also a real blimp, and it can carry a total of 10 people, has two engines, and has a 170,297 cubic foot envelope. This airship tends to be used for advertising, but it currently doesn’t have any advertising and was last seen just flying around Dallas, Texas. In the recent past, N157LG advertised Dick’s Sporting Goods and Subway.
But Wait, There’s More!
Dainis notes that what makes 2025 different is the fact that, unlike pretty much any other time in the past decade, there are at least two more airships flying around America right now. Remember LTA Research? Well, that company is running two of its own airships out of San Francisco right now.
One of them is N620LG, a 2002 American Blimp Corporation A60R that used to be an advertising blimp, but is now being used for LTA’s testing. Check out this video:
The other is N125LT, which is LTA’s homegrown Pathfinder 1 airship. Pathfinder 1 was unveiled in 2023, and it’s a rigid airship. That means it has a complete superstructure. What’s awesome about the Pathfinder 1 is that it’s currently the biggest modern aircraft in the world, measuring at 406.5 feet long and 66 feet wide.
To put that size into perspective, a Boeing 747-800 is 250 feet long. The Pathfinder 1 is huge, but it isn’t as big as history’s largest airships. The LZ 129 Hindenburg was a whopping 804 feet long.
LTA’s Pathfinder 1 flew indoors in 2023 before flying over San Francisco for the first time in May 2025. So, there’s a lot of buzz about this airship right now because, I mean, when was the last time you’ve seen a 400-foot-long airship buzzing around the Bay?
LTA Research says its journey began in 2013 when Google co-founder Sergey Brin and former NASA director Alan Weston joined forces to modernize the airship. The pair were disappointed that the last Navy airship was built in 1960 and that airships aren’t used for carrying passengers or cargo anymore. Dr. Weston and Brin believe that airships are the future of air transportation because they can deliver people and cargo anywhere in the world without road infrastructure, airports, or seaports. So, inspired by NASA’s own exploits with airships, the pair founded LTA and got to work.
Here’s what LTA says its mission is:
We are developing advanced technologies to dramatically increase the capabilities and lower the cost of 21st century airships. With these next-generation airships, we strive to improve humanitarian aid delivery and reduce carbon emissions, while providing economic opportunity and new jobs to Americans. LTA airships will have the ability to complement — and even speed up — humanitarian disaster response and relief efforts, especially in remote areas that cannot be easily accessed by plane and boat due to limited or destroyed infrastructure. We ultimately aim to create a family of aircraft with zero emissions that, when used for shipping goods and moving people, would substantially reduce the global carbon footprint of aviation.
In 2014, Dr. Alan Weston began researching continuing airship development by digging through Akron, Ohio’s archives, by talking with engineers at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH, and by chatting with Goodyear’s engineers.
The result is a modern reworking of an idea that’s more than a century old. The Pathfinder 1 envelope features 13 circular main frame ribs made out of 3,000 welded titanium hubs and 10,000 carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer tubes. Inside, it houses 13 helium gas bags made from a ripstop nylon base fabric and a urethane cover. It’s pushed through the sky with an orchestra of 12 electric motors that were developed with Pipistrel Aircraft.
Other parts include a gondola designed with Zeppelin and a landing gear adapted from the Zeppelin NT. All of it is controlled by a fly-by-wire system developed by LTA’s engineers. The Pathfinder 1, which is only the first of three Pathfinder airships to be built, is designed to be flown by a single pilot with a joystick, the thrust-vectoring motors, and four rudders.
So, it sounds like this thing is at the cutting edge of airship design. Apparently, Pathfinder 3 will be even larger and will preview LTA’s plans to put its airship design into production. Admittedly, I’m not sold on the idea of airships being the future of air transportation – even LTA’s airship is still slow – but I can see them working for disaster relief.
It’s A Good Time To Love Airships
Either way, I’m not really here to litigate that. I just want to tell you how awesome it is that there are at least seven airships flying around America right now. The reason why I say “at least” is that there are roughly a dozen or so airships still registered in America, so you might even see one that I didn’t note here.
It’s a great time to love blimps! It’s pretty common and standard for Goodyear to fly its blimps, so that’s not surprising. It’s also common to see the occasional advertising blimp. But since there are startups that are obsessed with making airships mainstream again, now you get more chances to see one. Remember, LTA Research isn’t even alone in this field. There’s a guy who wants to park a huge floating warehouse above Los Angeles.
But for now, four of America’s operational airships could be found in California at different times, and the others can be found in Florida, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere. So, if you love blimps, be sure to look up into the sky and check out apps like SkyCards. Who knows, maybe a fun airship may be near you soon!
Top graphic images: Mercedes Streeter; LTA Research
“There Are At Least Seven Airships Floating Around The USA Right Now, So Keep Your Eyes Peeled”
FIFY Goodyear’s delusional marketeers can do what they want. That doesn’t mean anyone else has to cater to their nonsense.
Maybe I read the article too fast but you have a missed opportunity to discuss thermal airships (or hot air airships). Instead of helium or hydrogen, they operate like a hot air balloon by heating the air inside of the envelope to remain lighter than air. They differ from a hot air balloon in that they also have an engine and propeller to steer like a normal gas airship. Since hot air is less efficient than hydrogen or helium, they cannot lift as much weight and can only stay in the air for a short period of time (due to both weather and propane storage limitations). There are even American balloon manufacturers that produce them like Cameron Balloons.
Poor, misguided Subway; their advertising vehicle was itself an ad for the competition.
There’s ALSO a salad-in-a-loaf-of-bread restaurant called “Bread Zeppelin”
https://breadzeppelin.com/
Do they still indicate Ice Cube’s pimp status?
I actually know the answer to this one: when the flying aircraft carrier USS Macon was based at Moffett Field near Mountain View before it crashed in 1935.
I remember in the early 1990’s, when I was outside for gym class in high school in the western suburbs of Chicago, we’d occasionally see the MetLife blimp… I wonder what happened to that one?
I had the good fortune of having the west coast Goodyear blimp fly past my house a few months ago on its way back south from Seattle. It was hard to track on flightaware due to flying relatively low. It also moved faster than I expected it to. The online schedule seems to be very general and not entirely accurate.
I hear that there used to be fewer blimps needed to cover events, but inflation is real.
Terrible, just terrible.
Take your smiley.
Fact: The Goodyear Blimp is the greatest motor vehicle ever used for marketing and promotion. Yup, I’ll even place it ahead of the Weinermobile.
Marty Supreme approves.
Weird timing on this post, since I just attended a lunchtime roundtable where the CEO of LTA was discussing Pathfinder.
I’m amazed the German company still uses the word Zeppelin. I still associate it with the Hindenburg rather than the band. I suppose it was named after a person, but still.
I’ll forever be a wee bit sad that airship transportation ceased to really be a thing after the Hindenburg. I just like the idea of traveling from one place to another just for the sake of enjoying the travel and not getting there as fast as humanly possible.
Honestly, if given enough time, I’d probably rather take a slow and scenic airship ride across America than board a commercial flight. But I suspect that people like you and me are a weird minority. 🙂
I’m in that group, especially if there is real food and espresso and a WIFI connection. There is an S/F book by David Brin called Earth and all the tourist travel in that future is via blimps.
This one flew over my house the other day: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=marty+supreme+blimp&t=opera&ia=images&iax=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FIDpiZpjvSGs%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg …it’s promotional for a movie is what I gather. I assume they were getting footage of it going past the Hollywood sign, but I didn’t see another aircraft or drone nearby, so maybe they were just sightseeing while promoting the movie.