Put a beautiful island off the coast of any continent and the inhabitants of that continent will invent all manner of means of getting to that island.
Take Catalina, for example. Over the thousands of years that humans have lived in what we now call Southern California, they have made their way here from the mainland by ti’ats and tomals, skiffs and jetskis, schooners and sloops, kayaks and outriggers.
Put a beautiful island off the coast of any continent and the inhabitants of that continent will invent all manner of means of getting to that island.
Take Catalina, for example. Over the thousands of years that humans have lived in what we now call Southern California, they have made their way here from the mainland by ti’ats and tomals, skiffs and jetskis, schooners and sloops, kayaks and outriggers.
Several of the more daring members of the human race have swum to the Island or actually walked here on big inflatable “shoes.”
One fellow, Reza Baluchi, a.k.a. the “Bubble Man,” even tried rolling to Catalina inside of a custom-made plastic sphere (he called it quits after about three hours).
From the air they have come by rotary wing aircraft as well as fixed-wing affairs of all sorts from ultralights to airliners.
But one of the more novel methods of reaching Catalina came in the form of lighter-than-air dirigibles, also known as “airships” or simply “blimps.” But unlike some of the aforementioned, one-time “stunt” methods of getting to Catalina, early airship service to Catalina was in fact a bonafide scheduled passenger service.
In fact, in yet another aviation first for Catalina, the service operated by Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company was the first such passenger service in the United States.
(The first airline in the world that offered scheduled passenger airship service is considered to be DELAG, or Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft. Known in the United States simply as the German Airship Transportation Corporation, Ltd., DELAG was established in November 1909 as an offshoot of the well-known Zeppelin Company. They began scheduled airship service between Berlin and southern Germany in 1919—only a year before Goodyear’s Catalina service).
It was in 1919 that the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company built the “Catalina blimp.” Not having any idea what kind of reception such a vessel might have with the paying public, Goodyear decided to start off small and build the smallest practical blimp they could.
That being said, the Goodyear Pony Blimp was still 95 feet long and had a maximum diameter of 28 feet. Goodyear designed this particular airship mostly for private use and sport, along with limited military applications. The U.S. Navy immediately took a shine to the new form of transportation.
Catalina’s Pony Blimp sported an airbag that was (wisely) filled with helium and not the more volatile and flammable hydrogen. For a power plant, the Pony Blimp utilized a good old reliable Model T Ford engine that turned a pusher prop.
Service to Catalina officially began on August 21, 1920, and helped fill a void created by the departure of Chaplin Airways, Catalina’s first scheduled passenger service airline.
The Pony Blimp would leave from Goodyear’s facilities in Los Angeles, probably the old Vail Field near Downey, and make the 39-mile trip out to the Island in about an hour. The company offered six daily flights, Wednesdays through Thursdays, cutting significant time off the land-and-sea trips to Catalina of the time. Passengers were crowded into the gondola that swung beneath the airbag.
Like the new-fangled seaplane coming out right about this time, the blimp was the fashionable way to get to Catalina and a favorite for fishermen who would cast their lines from the gondola while the skipper hovered the blimp just above the ocean surface. The public had very little trepidation about traveling in blimps at the time (the infamous Hindenburg Disaster was still nearly 20 years away).
Back in the Roaring Twenties, America had high hopes for such novel inventions and it was assumed that dirigibles—including Catalina’s Pony Blimp—would be around forever. In an article in “Aviation and Aeronautical Engineering from 1920, Goodyear prophesized that “…little by little, do we see the inevitable day brought closer when airships beyond today’s conception will carry great passenger and freight loads.”
But as promising as the new mode of transportation may have seemed at the time, it was not to be. Goodyear’s Pony Blimp service to Catalina lasted scarcely two or three seasons before throwing in the towel.
