(lighthearted orchestral music)

[Narrator] The new airship is the

latest in aviation technology.

[Narrator] The new blimp has new avionic system.

It holds about an additional 100,000

cubic feet of helium.

[Narrator] It's longer. It's faster.

It's bigger. It's better.

[Narrator] The old Good Year blimp is 192 feet long,

and the new Good Year blimp is 246 feet long.

The new ships are called semi-rigid airships,

so they have a structure inside.

The old blimps are literally a blimp,

it's almost like a balloon, that is steerable.

Right behind me is the new Good Year blimp,

which we've been in the process of engineering

and planning work since somewhere around 2007 or so.

Building, in particular, building this airship,

we start with laying fixtures on the ground.

We have 13 different frame sections in the structure.

We insert tensioning cables to the frame structure to

hold the frame tight, and then from there we

spin the airship frame from the ceiling,

and from there we take the envelope

and we open it up kind of like a big fish

and just kinda slide it,

it's like putting your socks on.

Just slide it over your foot.

So we slide the envelope right over top

of this structure, and there's about

five thousand different attach points

on the envelope where it attaches to the structure.

The envelope itself is a Tedlar polyester fabric

and it's a polyurethane coating that seals

the layers together, which is about

a 1.5 mil fabric, it's very thin,

like a sheet of tissue paper.

It also makes a very good barrier for the helium,

which is a very small molecule,

so it's our helium barrier.

And then on the outside we have

the control surfaces. We have the engines,

we put the passenger gondola on,

stick the landing gear on, and then after that

we put helium inside of it.

We also clean the helium too.

We'll purify and clean it.

The airship without helium weighs about 19,000 pounds.

Uh, so in order to maintain the helium at a very high

purity throughout the life of the airship

often we have to purify that helium

using this machine here.

Generally if we get purity below about

97 and a half percent,

we have a significant loss of lift,

and we'd like to bring that back up as close

or even above 99 percent if we possibly can.

Usually the biggest contaminant in the Helium

is moisture, Water Vapor.

So, as it cycles through the machine it pulls

the water vapor out and we have

a five gallon bucket behind it

with an outflow hose,

and a lot of times we'll get two or three

five-gallon buckets full of water.

The engines have vector rotating props.

Now the airship actually lands

and takes off like a helicopter.

It can also kinda hover in the air.

It still can land like an airplane,

but it also has the ability to hover.

So, with that ability to hover

it can come straight down, and straight up.

[Jim] And then we take the airship outside and go flying.

It can go 30 to 40 percent faster than the existing blimp.

[Derek] The speed will allow us to get to cities

in less time frame than we did with our previous iterations.

It's amazing, it's like driving

a really old car your whole life

and then getting a BMW.

[Chris] There's something kinda mystical about it

that you see and go Wow, that's cool.

It's not something you see every day.

(synthesizer)