It is based in Carson, at 19200 S. Main Street, on a 27-acre site alongside the 405. Goodyear opened the base in January 1968, which means it has been part of the drive north for longer than most of the neighborhoods around it have had their current names.
If you live in the South Bay you have seen it a hundred times without thinking about it. Here is what is actually up there.
It has not been a blimp for years
A blimp is an airship with no internal skeleton. It holds its shape purely from the pressure of the gas inside it. Let the helium out and it collapses like a balloon.
The airship flying out of Carson is a semi-rigid, roughly 250 feet long, built on an internal frame. That makes it a dirigible, not a blimp. Goodyear still calls it the Goodyear Blimp, because after a century that name is worth more than the technical correction. But if someone tells you the blimp went over, the pedantic answer is that it did not, because there is no longer a blimp to go over.
Which airship is up there
The Carson base has housed at least nine Goodyear airships since 1968, under five names: the Columbia, the Eagle, the Spirit of America, the Spirit of Innovation, and the Wingfoot series. Wingfoot Three, registration N3A, has been the Carson airship since August 6, 2019.
Fleet assignments do change, and airships move between the three United States bases. If you want to know what is flying today rather than what has been flying since 2019, Goodyear keeps a current fleet page.
The hangar is the part people miss
In December 2017 Goodyear put up a 337-foot inflatable hangar at the Carson base. It is the largest inflatable hangar in North America and the second largest in the world. You have almost certainly looked straight at it from the freeway and registered it as a warehouse.
Can you go see it
Not on your own schedule. Goodyear does not take individual public tour requests at Carson. What it does do is let visitors watch from the observation deck on days the airship is scheduled to fly, and it opens the base for occasional events, such as the Toys for Tots collection it hosted in December 2025.
The way in is to ask. Airship Operations in Carson takes tour inquiries at 310-327-6565, extension 101. Call before you drive, because whether anything is happening that day depends entirely on the flight schedule and the weather.
Why you see it so often
Carson sits at the inland edge of the South Bay, and the airship works the Los Angeles sports calendar. Anything at SoFi Stadium, the Rose Bowl, Dodger Stadium, or a Southern California golf tournament is a reason for it to be in the air, and the route between the base and most of those venues runs over the South Bay. It is not following you. You just happen to live under the commute.
Sources and further reading: The Center for Land Use Interpretation and the Los Angeles Almanac.
