"Hey There, Blimpy Boy!"

[Twelvefield]

Hey there, blimpy boy!
Flying through the sky so fancy free...
- Homer Simpson

I've decided to embark on a number of excursions using the truly fabulous Skyship 600. Unfortunately, the Skyship people won't let me near any of their facilities - they cite too many times that I've watched "Black Sunday" (twice), that and I know all the lyrics to "Blimpy Boy" - so I have to settle for the virtual Airship 600 in MSFS.

It's really my favourite ride so far in flight sim. A blimp is easy to fly: all you do is let go of the tether. But it can be hard to control. You're not likely to corkscrew it into the ground, but it's really easy to get a bad attitude and if the wind picks you up, you either sail high into the blue and are never seen again*, or else you end up crashing into the Empire State Building.

It's nothing like a boring old tubeliner, streamlined, computerized, and efficient. It's more like trying to sail a submarine half-filled with rolling marbles through a turbulent ocean of thin air. You have to be thinking well in advance of whatever it is you're trying to do in a blimp, aerial chess moves like a massive Queen's Gambit in the sky, where you constantly trade position for altitude in the hopes of getting a decent approach. The blimp won't loop or roll, but it does gyrate quite a lot.

As for Black Sunday, that fiction is at that very peculiar intersection between one-way blimp excursions, the Palestine-Israel war, Presidential assassination, and the Superbowl. Strange how stories from the pre-millennium seem to repeat themselves today. All these things are in my news feed, so I figured I should revisit the Black Sunday book. It's Thomas Harris' first novel, and only one of two of his stories that don't include Hannibal Lector. You can see traces of Clarice Starling and Dr. Lector in his early writing, though.

Bare bones summary: bad guys want to use the Goodyear Blimp to blow up a bomb over the Superbowl, of which the President of America is attending. The politics of the novel are lurid and heavily stereotyped, but then look at what we have today. We don't need to go any farther than this.

The action zeroes in on Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, so that's where I flew in MSFS. The Aldrich (Goodyear) Blimp takes off from New Orleans Lakefront Airport, which is somewhat different now than it was in the 1970's when the book was written. Everything in New Orleans is somewhat different now than when the book was written. From the sky, it's easy to see that a considerable amount of flood and hurricane damage remains.

Head south along the Interstate 10 Highway to see the Caesar's Superdome downtown. In the novel, the Superdome was still being built for the Superbowl, but it was far behind schedule. The game gets moved to nearby Tulane Stadium, a very large College Bowl football field. There is an exciting gun battle at the Superbowl construction site, with the good guys trying desperately to stop the bomb from being delivered to the bad guys.

Flying downtown, to the left you see the famous French Quarter and Decatur Street hugging the milk chocolate-brown Mississippi River. Leave the I-10 downtown to go west on Highway 90, and you end up at Tulane University. Tulane Stadium has since been replaced on site by the more modern Yulman Stadium. (The movie takes place in Miami, at the Orange Bowl, which was quite a bit larger than Yulman. I guess I should fly a blimp there, too, although the Orange Bowl was replaced in the early 2000's by LoanDepot Park - a baseball stadium. I like the old open-air stadiums: if there's a dome, then there's no need for a blimp.)

This part is interesting, from a pilot perspective. In the book, the bomb has to be detonated at 800 feet above the stadium in order to kill everybody. It's a big bomb. Even at 800 feet up, the stadium looks far away. A normal cruising altitude is more like 1,500 feet. A common use for the Goodyear blimp is as an aerial camera mount, with the price of an HD camera starting at a million dollars. The blimp can sail on high and still get great pictures with a lens like that. The other use for the blimp is advertising, and so the craft may be brought down to lower altitudes for this purpose.

I discovered a good reason to come in relatively low: clouds. Fluffy white stuff frequently got in the way of my view of the stadium, obliging me to make a sweeping nose dive. From what I recall, modern blimps have gimballed seats so that passengers aren't alarmed by the nose-up nose-down porpoising of a blimp. It's a slow-motion roller-coaster ride. You have to be nimble with the vertical thrusters to avoid smashing into the stadium, like in the most iconic visual from the Black Sunday movie. While Black Sunday was the first major motion picture to use a real Superbowl (Superbowl X), the crash scene was filmed at the Miami Orange Bowl some time after the season was done, using thousands of extras and a gigantic mock-up of the blimp's nose. So: no crashing into Tulane.

This was to be a return trip. There have been some very notable airship disasters: when one goes down it's equally tragic and spectacular. Landing the blimp in MSFS is difficult, and I pride myself on being able to land anything on anything. Even so, I've crashed the Airship 600 at least a dozen to twenty times, maybe more, and I've brought the ship in for a landing exactly twice. ("How many drops is this for you, Lieutenant?" Wrong movie.)

Back to Lakefront Airport, floating over the casinos and skyscrapers of downtown New Orleans. I fight a headwind, which is a good thing. With a headwind, the nose is easy to keep in the right direction, and my vertical speed is enhanced, both climbing and diving. Landing into the wind allows me also to kill forward speed and maintain alignment with the landing threshold. For once I stick the landing, and for the first time it's on the runway, too. I did mash the landing gear, but that's the ground crew's problem. At least it's not the humiliating You Crashed, Dummy black screen of death.

* In MSFS, to have the blimp mounted to a support truck, you have to pick a parking spot at the airport. The physics of the game often cause the blimp to lurch as it's being attached to its post. Sometimes the blimp flips over, and sometimes the blimp detaches and floats away. Since you start out on foot doing your walkaround, it becomes problematic to watch from the truck as your aircraft soars away into the clouds and never comes down again. You somehow feel responsible for that.

Real blimps have a ripcord. If there is a disaster and the blimp self-launches, the ripcord vents the gas inside the craft and it comes quickly back down to Earth. That's definitely a conversational gem you can use during chili'n'cheese night at the family dinner table, especially if you time it for when the beans kick in (I know, I know - real chili has no beans!).