High on Helium : Pilot Trips the Light Fantastic in Goodyear’s Floating Billboard

On a summer’s evening when the wind is not blowing too hard, Tom Matus likes to hover in the Goodyear Blimp over his Huntington Beach house.

The 49-year-old blimp pilot wafts around the neighborhood and toward the beach, flashing messages like, “Shriners Help Crippled Children . . . Free.” He flies over, he said, to check on things at home and, frankly, just to be seen. With all 7,560 light bulbs glowing, it is hard to miss him, which for Goodyear is exactly the point.

Matus has been flying the blimp and anything else he could get his hands on for 20 years.

Before he got his job piloting the blimp, he was a flight instructor. And until he sold his Cessna two-seater a few years back, Matus used to fly the 30 miles to work each day. He would take off from Meadowlark Airport, just a few blocks from his house, and land on a grass field near the blimp base in Carson. The trip took seven minutes.

Matus has been flying since he was 23, most of his friends work in aviation and he still takes his morning coffee with the old-time fliers at the Meadowlark Airport Cafe.

‘Can Fly Anything’

One of them is Joe Hughes, an aerobatic pilot who likes to boast, “I can fly anything that I can get started.” Hughes spent about 15 years performing in air shows around the country and doing stunts for television and movies.

Hughes went up in the blimp with Matus one time. To impress his daredevil friend, Matus attempted a tailspin, a stunt in which a plane climbs high in the air, then stalls and spins like a leaf toward the ground.

Trouble is, you cannot really stall a blimp, so in place of a real tailspin, the blimp kind of puttered downward in circles. “But it looked like one (a tailspin) from inside,” Hughes said.

Except for takeoff, when it roars skyward at what feels like a 90-degree angle, the blimp cruises as smoothly as

an ocean liner. Matus said he ascends quickly so the sight does not cause accidents on the nearby San Diego Freeway.

Matus has taken all kinds of people up in his blimp, including Bob Hope, Johnny Cash and test pilot Chuck Yeager.

One time Matus took up an aviation company employee who promised to take him on a ride he would never forget. Curious about the offer, Matus asked, “Oh, yeah, what do you fly?”

The guy was an ejection seat designer.

Most people go up in the blimp just for the ride, but a few have made some rather strange requests.

“A lot of people want to be married in the blimp,” he said. One man, who was doing a commercial about fruit, asked to paint the blimp shed to look like a can of pineapple.

Other people just plain chicken out when they see the passenger car hanging beneath the blimp’s enormous sack, which holds 200,000 cubic feet of helium. Stayshich Milan, a Goodyear mechanic who has been working in the blimp crew for 11 years, has seen many nervous riders. When the scared ones approach the blimp’s boarding ladder, he said, “They just flatly refuse to get in.”

Though the blimp can be frightening at first, it is one of the safest of aircraft, according to Goodyear, which operates two other blimps.

Matus put it in an aviator’s terms: “It’s one of the only aircraft you can have a complete engine failure in and still remain airborne.”