What It Feels Like Inside the Goodyear Blimp

People assume a blimp ride is a hot-air balloon with better branding. Silent. Pastoral. The sort of thing you do with a thermos and a cardigan. I am here to correct the record. The vibration-heavy gondola of the Goodyear Blimp is not what you'd call serene. It's what you'd call a religious conversion on an engine mount.

The noise arrives before the view

You climb into a gondola roughly the size of a generous minivan, and the first thing that happens is sound. Two engines bolted more or less to the cabin you are sitting in, thrumming through the aluminum frame, up through the seat, into your molars. Conversation becomes a form of interpretive shouting. Everything in your pockets migrates. You feel the airship the way you feel a washing machine with a brick in it.

And then the ground lets go. Not the way it does in an airplane, where physics slams a door and you are simply elsewhere. A blimp doesn't leave. It declines. It stops agreeing with the earth and drifts up, nose slightly high, and the whole thing feels less like flight than like being politely lifted by something enormous and mildly bored.

Then the window happens

At about a thousand feet, the noise stops mattering. You're low enough to see individual people doing individual, unremarkable things — a man hosing a driveway, a woman arguing with a car trunk, kids in a cul-de-sac playing a game with rules known only to them. From an airliner, the world is a map. From a blimp, it's a diorama with the lid off, and everyone in it is still living their life because they don't know you're watching.

The most important thing anyone can ever design is their own exit strategy.

That's the line I keep coming back to, and it started up there. Because what struck me in that shuddering fiberglass box was how slow the whole enterprise was, and how much you saw because of it. Speed is a way of skipping the middle. The blimp has no middle to skip. It is all middle.

What it actually changed

I got out with ringing ears and the beginning of an idea that took me another forty years to say out loud: that the extraordinary thing is almost never the destination. It's the loud, awkward, slightly ridiculous vehicle you took to get there. I have never in my life chased a comfortable experience and come away with a story. I have chased the noisy ones, the ones that leave you fascinatingly scuffed, and every single one of them is still with me.

The blimp is one chapter of many in A Beautiful, Chaotic, Leaky Symphony — a memoir about a man who kept climbing into loud contraptions to see what the world looked like from inside them. If you want the rest of the noise, the book is where I put it.