When you’re flying a 130 foot airship on a 17 week, 25 city tour of the eastern U.S., you pay pretty close attention to the weather. And you always need to think ahead for a place to land.
Lucky for the Budweiser Blimp crew, Aloft Aerial Photography’s Hunter H. Harris is in Talbot County. As one of the most experienced airship pilots in the world, Hunter knows exactly what it takes to fly and land any kind of aircraft, including blimps.
When the crew called him looking for a place to land early this week, Hunter made a few phone calls, and found a farm just outside Easton with a freshly cut field, and not too many electric wires surrounding it. The next morning, a small group of friends and media met at the airport and caravanned out to the field.
We watched the airship take off and land, with a 12 person ground crew that signaled to each other and chased after the blimp when it came sliding into the field. Grabbing it, pulling and tethering to a “mast” attached to stakes deep in the ground, the crew maneuvered the ship in place. When safely on the ground and moored to the mast, the airship swings freely, and requires crewmembers continually on watch, 24/7.
The Budweiser airship is a “mini-blimp” – a fraction of the size of the large blimps you’ve seen, such as the Goodyear blimp. Those can hold up to about 200,000 cubic feet of helium. The Budweiser Blimp holds 69,000 cubic feet of helium (and according to Budwesier, would hold roughly 5 million 12 oz. cans of Budweiser in its envelope.) With illumination from two stadium bulbs, it flies at night as well as in daytime.
The ship’s maximum speed is 50 mph, but it typically flies at 30 – 35 mph, at a altitude of 1,000 ft.
No Budwesier Blimp has flown for over ten years, and this tour is expected to last till September 20th. It’s on a public relations tour, spreading Budweiser’s safety message “Designate a Driver”. The blimp will fly over sports events, cities, arenas, fairs – day and night – spreading the message and encouraging participation.
Consumers 21 and older can follow the blimp on twitter @budblimp and using the hashtag #ddblimp, can tweet photos and locations of the airship.
Budweiser encourages adults to log on to www.budblimp.com to take a pledge to drink responsibly, always designate a driver, and share their pledge on facebook, encouraging their friends to do the same. The same website offers a schedule of the blimp’s stops on the tour.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Hunter H. Harris is a Talbot Spy fan, and guess who got to take a ride?
YES. Joe Prettyman and I went up.
Flying in the Budweiser Blimp was unlike any other flight I’ve taken. Harris says “it’s the closest thing you’ll ever get to a magic carpet ride. “And as we flew over Talbot County, out past the Easton airport, Tunis Mills, to St. Michaels, looking out over Eastern Bay, and Tilghman Point sticking out into the Miles River with the big Chesapeake Bay beyond, I had one overarching response. This land, this county of ours – as beautiful as it is watery, is very exposed, so very fragile.
You can look at a map a thousand times and not get a sense of how fragile it appears from the air. Talbot County is truly “out there” – dangling out there in the big water, with rising seas, climate change, hurricane season and sinking land. The flight made quite a poignant point: we really are all in this together.
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