The iconic Goodyear blimp has returned to London’s skies for the first time since 2022, floating above the city in a rare and spectacular display of lighter-than-air travel.
With a capacity of just 14 passengers, securing a seat aboard the 75-metre airship has been compared to finding a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
Airships were once considered a genuine rival to the aeroplane, with the so-called “golden age of the dirigible” during the 1920s and 30s promising utopian long-distance travel using relatively little fuel.
By the late 1920s, transatlantic crossings were being made regularly, with the leisurely journey taking around 110 hours to complete from one continent to the other.
The first airship to use helium as its method of flotation, the Goodyear Pilgrim, sailed in 1925, though most rivals still relied on cheaper but highly flammable hydrogen gas.
The catastrophic Hindenburg disaster of 1937 effectively ended the airship’s commercial ambitions, with the footage and famous cry of “Oh the humanity” broadcast around the world.
Today, as few as 25 airships remain in operation globally, a figure so small that there are now more astronauts than there are qualified airship pilots.
Tyre giant Goodyear remains the most recognisable name in the industry, operating a fleet of four airships, though technically its craft is a zeppelin-blimp hybrid with a semi-rigid skeleton.
The European blimp is currently docked at Damyns Hill Aerodrome in Upminster, and at 75 metres in length it is equivalent to two and a half blue whales laid end to end.
Boarding is a strictly one-on, one-off affair given the challenge of managing a nine-tonne aircraft, and the steps leading to the cabin sway a full foot above the ground rather than touching it.
The cabin is arranged similarly to an aeroplane, with seats lining vast windows, some of which remain open during flight, creating an immediate and visceral awareness of the open air outside.
The blimp has a maximum altitude of 3,000 metres but prefers to cruise at just 300 metres, offering passengers a uniquely intimate perspective on the city below.
At that height, skyscrapers resemble building blocks while human-scale details remain perfectly visible, including a man doing a graceful breaststroke at Charlton Lido and a tennis ball glowing neon green on a court below.
The route heads west from the docklands, drifting past the O2 Arena and onwards toward Canary Wharf, with the River Thames curving beneath like a wide grey ribbon.
A low hum from the propellers is the only sound, nothing resembling the roar of a conventional aircraft cabin, and the blimp lists only gently as it follows the river’s curve.
Passengers who work with Goodyear commercially use flights as a business perk, with one fellow passenger aboard revealing he equips his entire haulage fleet with Goodyear tyres.
The pilots sit separated from passengers by little more than a small step, their side windows open to the air in a manner that makes the whole experience feel remarkably informal and unhurried.
As the impulse to photograph the Houses of Parliament, the Tate Modern, and the London Eye eventually fades, passengers fall into what can only be described as a shared, slack-jawed hush.
The blimp is moored to a large truck at the end of each day, with a pilot remaining on site overnight before it is ready to take to the skies again the following morning.
The experience left a strong impression even on a passing taxi driver near the aerodrome, who spotted the silhouette bobbing above the treeline and asked: “Do you mind if I stop and take a photo?”