Travel Seller’s Report: Seeing San Francisco by Zeppelin

Rail travel experts Ted Blishak and his wife, Sylvia Blishak, take to the sky. Operators of Train Travel Consulting at Accent on Travel in Klamath Falls, OR, which Conde Nast has named “Top Travel Specialists for Rail Travel,” Ted recounts his family’s experience of a blimp ride (er, dirigible) — something all agents can help arrange for their clients.

When I stepped off a particularly claustrophobic Reno Air flight from Chicago 15 years ago, I was ahead of the curve.

“I’ll never fly again,” I declared.

Nevertheless, as an enthusiast of historic air vehicles, I recently read about the Airship Ventures Zeppelin Eureka. I was determined to take a sightseeing trip aboard her around San Francisco Bay. Friends and relatives, amazed, said, “You said you’d never fly again, so why ride in a blimp?”

“A dirigible,” I corrected, “and it doesn’t fly; it floats. A blimp is a big balloon. This dirigible has an interior structure and compartments filled with helium.”

On a fine spring morning, Sylvia and I were joined by five members of our California family, all looking forward to our adventure. During breakfast, our 10-year-old grand-nephew, Alonzo, was reading a book. We glanced over in horror as he turned the page to a photo of the Hindenburg going up in flames.

“Wow! Look at that! I’m not going up on one of those,” he said, shakily.

“The old Hindenburg used flammable hydrogen,” Sylvia explained. “But we’ll be on a brand-new Zeppelin. Like all American dirigibles and blimps, it’s filled with helium, which can’t catch fire.”

Soon, near Oakland Airport, we waited in a field ablaze with California poppies. The white, 246-foot-long airship “Eureka” appeared, then floated overhead, revealing her enormous size: she’s 15 feet longer than a Boeing 747. Slowly reversing her propellers then rotating them skyward in helicopter fashion, she pushed herself downward towards us. In this manner, she easily overcame her buoyancy without having to release any precious helium.

Eureka requires a special boarding procedure orchestrated by the ground crew in order to maintain her balance; we, the passengers, are used as ballast. As one disembarking passenger was helped off, a new passenger was assisted on board. This continued, with one person off and another on, until we had all traded places. The 200 hp Lycoming engines remained powered, keeping her in place vertically. But the Zeppelin was yawing horizontally in the breeze, so having the crew help us getting on and off was a comforting safety feature.

The cabin is spacious and has room for 12 passengers and two crew; every seat is a window seat with plenty of legroom. We could drift around inside taking pictures or sit next to the large observation window at the rear of the cabin.

Our pilot, Katharine “Kate” Board, is the only woman certified to pilot a dirigible.

Changing the props to forward thrust and revving the engines to pull us up, she took the ship to altitude, as people on the ground quickly became miniaturized. We were off!

The difference between flying in a plane — with engines constantly battling gravity — and floating in a lighter-than-air vehicle, with engines used only for positioning, is immense. I had an elated feeling that lasted throughout the flight and for days afterward. When my rather taciturn brother-in-law, Joe, couldn’t stop grinning, I knew we were all walking on air!

The visibility was startlingly clear, much different than the too-quick, too-high view one has through scratched Lexan windows on an airplane. At 1,200 feet, we moved along at about 40 mph.

Eureka floated over the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, with a bird’s-eye view of the new span under construction between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island. We cruised over the San Francisco waterfront and close to the downtown skyscrapers. As we turned toward Alcatraz, our shadow on the water preceded us. We approached the Golden Gate Bridge and then circled toward Sausalito. Hugging the shore of the bay, we passed over Belvedere, Tiburon, and Angel Island State Park, all covered in the verdant green peculiar to spring in California.

“There’s our house!” cried 7-year-old Joseph as we passed near Lake Merritt.

As our one-hour journey was drawing to an end, we watched our engines turn upward, then, as we descended, saw the grass in the field beneath us flattened outward as if by a helicopter.

Standing inside, we lined up, and then each of us wafted to the ground as we traded places with a new boarding passenger.

As the gigantic Eureka prepared to lift again, Kate, the pilot, did some adjustment to the vessel’s buoyancy by dumping ballast water. With a new group of passengers waving at us, she took to the skies.

Later, we all glided into a conference room at Oakland Airport Holiday Inn for champagne and an informative conversation with the Air Venture staff. They told us that Software entrepreneur Brian Hall, founder of a company called Mark/Space, and his wife, Alexandra, started Airship Ventures when they purchased a Zeppelin NT (New Technology) from Luftschifftechnik GmbH, the same German company that built the Hindenburg.

Their new airship offered sightseeing flights as she made her way to England. Still inflated with helium, her engines were removed and she was loaded inside a container built for transporting the Airbus jumbo jet. Placed on a freighter bound for Beaumont, TX, she then, under her own power, continued on to her headquarters at Moffett Field near Silicon Valley in California. There she can be stabled in a vintage dirigible hangar once used by the 785-foot-long USS Macon, a Navy Zeppelin aircraft carrier.

“Why didn’t the airship travel from Germany to California on her own?” I asked.

The moderator explained that, while they had been able to work out the technological details of the proposed journey, the bureaucratic details involving in floating over various countries stopped them cold.

After hoping all my life that I’d have a chance to board a Zeppelin, I’ve found the experience addictive. That joyous sense of levitation isn’t just physical; it’s a mental tonic, too. In fact, whenever I think about the trip, my spirits rise and I start walking on air!

Air Venture’s sightseeing itineraries include tours of Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay, Monterey Bay, Los Angeles, and San Diego. All-day transit flights between Northern and Southern California are also available. For more information, visit Airship Ventures at www.airshipventures.com/, or e-mail reservations@airshipventures.com.

To reach the Blishaks by e-mail, ted@traintravelconsulting.com, and visit www.traintravelconsulting.com.