Tire manufacturer Goodyear is offering fans of its iconic advertising blimps a chance to own a part of one.
The company is selling off pieces of the envelope from the Spirit of Goodyear, a blimp that flew across North America from 2000 to 2014, to mark the 100th year of the airship program.
The envelope is the part of the blimp that contains lighter-than-air gas.
Fans can buy the keepsake for $85 on Goodyear’s website. It comes in a commemorative box bearing the yellow Goodyear logo.
A portion of the proceeds will go to fund a new children’s exhibit at the EAA Aviation Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Goodyear recently announced that it will donate the gondola frame used on the blimps Europa and Stars and Stripes to the children’s exhibit at the museum.
Spirit of Goodyear, Europa, and Stars and Stripes were all part of Goodyear’s GZ-20 class of airships, which operated between the 1970s and the 2010s. Aside from promoting Goodyear products, they also provided television coverage of events like the U.S. Bicentennial, the World Series, and the Olympics.
The Spirit of Goodyear is the longest continuously operated airship in history and was the first blimp to provide high-definition aerial television coverage of a sporting event, ABC’s Monday Night Football. The airship’s gondola was donated to the Crawford Aviation Museum in Cleveland, but Goodyear held on to its envelope.
Goodyear retired its last true blimp, Spirit of Innovation, in 2017. It now uses semi-rigid airships, which have an internal structure supporting the envelope. These aircraft are technically not blimps, though Goodyear continues to refer to them as such.
