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View search results on mapThe airport at Pompano Beach, Florida is one of three official airship bases currently operated by Goodyear (the others are in Wingfoot Lake, Ohio, and Carson, California). In 1986 Goodyear opened new facilities at Pompano Beach, which included a new hangar, and an office building to serve the pilots, base administrator and public relations specialists. The blimps based here are used for promoting the Goodyear brand over the crowded beaches of the Florida coast.
One of the first major airship disasters in the US was in 1919, when Goodyear’s Wingfoot Air Express, a hydrogen-filled blimp, ignited in mid-air over the Loop in downtown Chicago. Pieces of flaming debris fell through the skylight of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank, killing ten employees and injuring 27 more. Three people on the ship were killed as well.
Gas pipelines converge at this gas plant north of Liberal, Kansas, including one that connects Denver to the Gulf of Mexico, and a 23-mile spur that connects to the Federal Helium Pipeline. Two commercial helium production plants are located here. One, the National Helium Plant, is a crude helium production facility operated by DCP Midstream, a large natural gas collecting, conveying, and processing company.
The Satanta Maintenance Station is a small facility on the Federal Helium Pipeline, north of the town of Satanta, Kansas. It is located roughly in the middle of the pipeline, which runs for more than 400 miles, from the Helium Reserve near Amarillo, Texas, to a helium plant at Bushton, Kansas. This is a field station for Amarillo-based pipeline operators, and is the only asset of the BLM’s helium operation outside of the Amarillo area, other than the pipeline itself.
The Jayhawk Helium Plant is one of two along the Federal Helium Pipeline that are operated by Praxair, Inc. It is located east of the town of Ulysses, on a site shared with a gas plant. The gas plant was originally built by Amoco in 1998, replacing a smaller one on site. It was later owned by BP, and now is owned by Linn Energy. It generates natural gas, along with some crude helium (which is around 70% helium, 30% other gas).
The German industrial gas company Linde operates what it calls one of the largest helium plants in the world at the west end of Otis, Kansas, a small town on the Federal Helium Pipeline. The plant has been operating since 1965, and was the first liquid helium plant in the world.
Houma Naval Air Station was one of eight blimp bases built during WWII. It operated until 1947, when it was transferred to the city of Houma, Louisiana, which has since operated the runways as a municipal airport, and the hangar area as an industrial park. The outlines of a few circular blimp mooring pads are still visible within the industrial park.
In September 1941, work started on what was to become the Naval Air Station South Weymouth, south of Boston, Massachusetts. This was the first of the eight blimp bases built during WWII. Though blimp operations stopped in the 1950s, the base continued to be developed and used by the Navy until 1997.
A movie set depicting the residential street in Watertown where the police hunted for and found the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, remains, decaying, on the edge of the old runways of the former Air Station at South Weymouth. The set was constructed in 2016, for the filming of Patriot’s Day, about the 2013 marathon bombing. A portion of Boston’s Boylston Street was also built on the old runways, for filming the explosion scenes for the movie.
The Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, in the middle of New Jersey, was the historic center for lighter-than-air aircraft activity in the USA. It is now part of a combined Navy, Army, and Air Force base called Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, and is still a major testing and training center for aircraft carrier flight operations, such as catapult launching and landing arresting systems.
The Navy base at Lakehurst, New Jersey, is the nursery, proving ground, and home base for most of the nation’s airship history. Outside its gates is a stone chapel that commemorates the history of human flight, and memorializes the lives lost in its pursuit. The chapel was built in 1933, between the crash of the Akron, and the Macon, identical twins 785 feet long, the largest flying objects ever made in the USA. One crashed in the Atlantic, the other in the Pacific.
The site of the most notorious airship disaster in the US is marked with a sign and a stone outline at the spot where the Hindenburg crashed in flames, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. The 800-foot-long Hindenburg was one of two German-made and operated rigid airships that made transatlantic flights between Germany and Lakehurst, New Jersey.
The Keyes Helium Plant is an old government plant, now closed, and a newer private helium plant, which is still functioning. The facilities are adjacent to one another, and are both connected to the Federal Helium Pipeline, which links production plants like these to the Federal Helium Reserve. The plant is located in the Keyes Gas Field, and was opened by the Bureau of Mines in 1959 to make helium from the helium-rich gas wells in the field.
On September 3, 1925, the USS Shenandoah, the first of three large rigid airships ever built in the USA, broke apart in a storm, and crashed to the ground near Ava, Ohio. Built just two years earlier, in Lakehurst New Jersey, the airship was 680 feet long, and held 2.1 million cubic feet of helium, nearly all that existed in the US at that time.
One of the more unusual modern airship crashes occurred when a tethered JLENS aerostat became untethered in 2015. The JLENS blimp, designed by Raytheon and TCOM in the late 1990s, was part of an experimental surveillance system, called the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS), that had been developed and tested in several forms, and at several places around the country.
The Sherhan Gas Plant is a natural gas refinery operated by DCP Midstream, a large gas processing and pipeline company. It is located just inside Texas, at the border of Oklahoma. A 37-mile-long pipeline spur links the plant to the Federal Crude Helium Pipeline, which connects to the Exell Helium Plant, and the Federal Helium Reserve, as Sherhan sometimes supplies crude helium to the system.
Helium Time Columns is a work of public art outside of the Discovery Center, a small science museum in the helium capital of the world, Amarillo, Texas. The sculpture was erected in 1968, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of helium, first noticed by astronomers in 1868 from spectrographs of the sun. Amarillo was the center of global helium production from the 1920’s to the 1990s. The monument is located in Jack B.
Goodyear operated a blimp base in Spring, Texas, north of Houston, from 1969 to 1992, which took over maintenance and assembly activities from Wingfoot Lake in Ohio, and served as the southeastern counterpart to the blimp base in Carson, California. Southeastern blimp operations moved to Florida, and after the Spring site closed, it was redeveloped into a shopping area.
The Hitchcock Naval Air Station was one of the eight blimp bases established in WWII. Like the other one guarding the Gulf of Mexico, at Houma, Louisiana, Hitchcock only had one hangar, and did not continue to be a military base for long after the war.
In 1922, the US Army airship Roma, a large hydrogen-filled blimp, hit power lines at a base in Hampton Roads, Virginia and caught fire, killing 34 of the 45 crew on board. Later that year, because of this crash, the Army and Navy announced that they would be moving away from flammable hydrogen as the lifting gas for airships, and moving to more inert helium, as soon as possible.
The Guggenheim Airship Institute, was established in 1929 on the edge of the airport at Akron, to study lighter-than-air engineering for the large rigid airships being built at that time. It was operated in partnership with the California Institute of Technology, and had laboratories and test facilities that included a vertical wind tunnel.
ILC Dover is an aerospace engineering and materials company based out of this plant in Frederica, Delaware. Most modern blimps are shaped plastic skins filled with helium, and ILC Dover makes these plastic envelopes for just about all the small blimps and aerostats currently in use in the USA. It also made spacesuits for NASA.
The Delaware Research and Technology Center is an R&D location for the French industrial gas company Air Liquide, one of the leading industrial gas distributors in the USA, handling gases like oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and helium. It bought Airgas in 2016. The company has an extensive network of pipelines totaling 2000 miles, connecting industries along the Mississippi River corridor, and beyond.
The General Electric MRI plant in Florence, South Carolina, is the primary production center for Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines, scanning devices that have revolutionized medial diagnosis, and other industries. MRI image sensors use around a quarter of all the helium that is produced in the world, making this a major destination for the specialty trucks carrying the cryogenically cooled (to -452 degrees) and compressed (at 2,800 lbs per square inch) liquefied gas.
In addition to its large phosphate mines and plants in Idaho and Wyoming, Simplot operates two small fertilizer plants in the midst of agricultural production in the central valley of California. One plant is at Helm, in the southern end of the valley, which primarily provides ammonium nitrate fertilizer to local agricultural suppliers.
The eastern portion of Nutrien’s phosphate operations in northern Florida surround the White Springs Suwanee River Chemical Plant. The company uses large draglines to remove overburden and dig out the ore, which is sent by slurry pipes to screening and sorting plants, then to production plants where sulfuric acid turns it into phosphoric acid and then into dry phosphate fertilizer products.
One of two major phosphate mines and processing plants in northern Florida, both of which are owned by Nutrien. Though it is more prolific in its production of nitrogen and potash fertilizer products, Nutrien is the second largest phosphate fertilizer production company in the USA, after Mosaic (which dominates production in the massive phosphate mining district east of Tampa).
Mosaic’s Plant City Plant is a bit of an outlier, located by itself north of the rest of the Bone Valley phosphate mines and plants. Since 1965 it has been operated by CF Industries, until it was purchased by Mosaic in 2014. At the end of 2017, after it had produced more than a million tons of processed phosphates and more than half a million tons of phosphoric acid that year, Mosaic announced it was idling the plant for at least a year.
Mosaic’s Tampa Marine Terminal is a storage and shipping facility at the Port of Tampa Bay, used for the export of DAP and MAP, the two primary phosphate fertilizers it produces at its three active central Florida plants, the largest single source of agricultural phosphates in the country. From here the material is shipped by barge around the Gulf Coast, and up the Mississippi to the corn belt and other agricultural areas.
Mosaic uses facilities at the port to receive and store the large amounts of anhydrous ammonia it needs to make phosphoric acid and other products at its production plants. One of these is the Hookers Point Terminal, acquired from CF Industries, with a 38,500-ton ammonia storage tank and a deep water dock. The terminal is connected to a 75-mile underground pipeline system that delivers ammonia to the Riverside Plant, and to the other plants in the Bone Valley.