Lighter-than-air vehicles, also known as dirigibles or airships, have floated in Texas skies for over a century, whether to monitor the coastline or to entertain parade guests. In 1924, the U.S. Navy’s Shenandoah was the first-ever scheduled flight into Fort Worth, where it fueled up to local fanfare before heading back out on its cross-country tour. In the 1940s, dirigibles dotted Hitchcock Naval Air Station on the Galveston coast to deter attacks on shipping vessels. And football fans may recall when in the ’70s, the recognizable Goodyear blimp hovered above Dallas Cowboys games.
But these appearances are just the surface of Texas’ ties to the lofty vehicles.
Airships owe much of their buoyant history to the state’s helium industry, which hit its peak in the early-to-mid 1900s. The country’s first helium extraction plant was built in 1915 by the U.S. government at an oil field near Wichita Falls to refuel dirigibles used in World War I. In 1929, the plant was usurped by the Amarillo Helium Plant at Cliffside Gas Field, which at one time furnished nearly the entire global supply of helium. The government considered the Bush Dome Reservoir, where natural gas was held before being processed at the plant, a “unique facility” with “no comparable storage facility for helium anywhere else in the world,” according to a 2000 report from the National Research Council. The plant closed in the 1990s after decades of declining use, and the nation’s helium reserve was sold in 2024 to Messer, an industrial gas company.
One of the only remaining airships in the state is an unmanned “tethered aerostat radar system” that U.S. Customs and Border Protection keeps moored northwest of Marfa to monitor the border. When it’s aloft, the aerostat resembles a UFO swirling with the dust devils—a reminder of how otherworldly airships must have appeared to the public decades ago.
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450 miles
Length of the pipeline that stretched through Kansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle in the mid-1900s, connecting 17 private crude helium production and refining plants to the federal reservoir
Maximum altitude of the tethered aerostat radar system northwest of Marfa
6
Number of blimps once moored at Hitchcock NAS outside Galveston
The Goodyear Blimp
246.4
Length, in feet, of the current Goodyear blimp
100
Years the Goodyear blimp has been airborne. It is crossing the U.S. this year on a 100-plus-city tour to celebrate the centennial, including a stop above South by Southwest in Austin
1969 to 1992
Period when the Goodyear blimp flew out of a base in Spring
