The Vice City Zeppelin Is Real: Goodyear’s Wingfoot Three Flies South in Full GTA 6 Livery

Nobody announced this. Members of the Goodyear Blimp Fan Club on Facebook simply started posting photos of an airship outside the hangar at Wingfoot Lake near Akron, Ohio, wearing a livery no airship has worn before. Rebecca Trussel shared the first picture of the Vice City lettering on the side, Cecil Richmond and Jim Cassatt added shots of the ship inside and outside the hangar, and Roger Durfee caught it lifting off with the VI logo visible underneath, a sequence first pulled together by Rockstar Intel. One of the early photos reportedly came from a man who looked up mid-walk and found Vice City floating over his morning route.

The wrap itself is a proper piece of work. The envelope is wrapped in a dark midnight artwork with palm silhouettes, pulled from art Rockstar has used on its own site, with the classic pink Vice City lettering down each side in the font the series has carried for nearly 25 years, the VI palm logo towards the nose, and Goodyear’s own winged-foot wordmark kept at the back. Neither Rockstar nor Goodyear has commented, which has become the house style of this entire marketing campaign: build something enormous, say nothing, let the internet do the announcing.

Everyone calls it the Vice City blimp, and everyone is technically wrong. Wingfoot Three is a Zeppelin NT, registration N3A, model LZ N07-101, a semi-rigid airship built around an internal frame rather than held in shape by gas pressure alone. Goodyear names its American fleet Wingfoot One, Two and Three, and this one is the newest, flying since 2018. Zeppelins are genuinely rare aircraft: only around seven are flying anywhere in the world, and Rockstar just got one of them painted pink.

An airship does not cross half a country in an afternoon. FlightAware clocked the departure at 8:37 in the morning on October 12, and the first leg ran 343 miles southeast to Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, about four hours and twenty minutes in the air at cruising speeds around 66 mph, close to the roughly 70 the type manages flat out. From there the trip continued in stages, with a ground crew following by road, local spotters tracking it over South Carolina, and the destination confirmed as Pompano Beach Airpark, the 32-acre base north of Fort Lauderdale that has staged Goodyear’s east-coast airships since 1979.

By Tuesday, October 14, it was being photographed over Miami itself, right as branded planes started towing GTA 6 banners over the beach. Airship watchers have also flagged a neat coincidence: Goodyear opened its current hangar at the Pompano base in 1986, the year the original Vice City is set. Whether Rockstar planned that or simply got lucky, the campaign now has a 200-foot billboard drifting over South Florida at 1,000 feet, visible for miles, exactly where the game’s launch marketing is concentrating.

The homage runs in both directions. A blimp drifts through GTA 6’s first trailer, so the real one is recreating a shot from the game it advertises. GTA 5’s Atomic blimp, the first properly flyable one in the series and originally a pre-order bonus, was modelled directly on the Goodyear original, and GTA Online later let players wrap a blimp in their own nightclub branding, which is more or less what Rockstar just did to an actual zeppelin. There is a reasonable expectation the GTA 6 version will be flyable, though Rockstar has confirmed nothing.

As for what the real one does next, nothing official has been said, but the timing writes its own speculation: the Hurricanes host Florida State at Hard Rock Stadium on Saturday night, the same venue Rockstar wrapped in Vice City art last Sunday, and airships love a stadium flyover. The wider Miami campaign it just joined is covered in the takeover story.