Goodyear Pompano Beach Blimp Base, Florida

The 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. They are also deployed to major outdoor sporting events in the southeastern USA, to be seen, and to shoot aerial video for broadcasts. The hangar is 275 by 150 feet, is the current home of Wingfoot One, the first of the latest generation of Goodyear blimps, now stationed in California and Ohio, too. The 250-foot-long, 65-foot-wide Wingfoot series is actually a semi-rigid airship, not a blimp, though the company has decided not to bother with such precise definitions anymore, and calls it a blimp, since everyone else does anyhow.