Yesterday we saw it far away, today it almost flew over our heads: earlier, the brand new WDL Blimp made a tour over the inner city for the first time. It does look somewhat like a freshly peeled egg, because now the hull is not silver like on the previous WDL airships, but completely white.

The Blimp is back in town! Back in June 2014, our area was hit by a horrible storm, which not only flattened thousands of trees and did a lot of other damage, but also destroyed our local WDL Blimp. It was moored at its mast at the airport and could not be moved into its hangar because the storm hit so quickly. But the company who owns it and has been operating airships from our local airport since over 40 years and they built a brand-new ‘Zeppelin’ over the course of the last year. The inaugural flight was already a few days ago, but today we were able to see it fly from our home for the first time. This new airship is called Theo in honour of the late company founder Theodor Wüllenkämper, who started his business in the 1950s by flying advertising banners with small biplanes.

I recorded this little video two days before the blimp was heavily damaged and almost completely destroyed in the huge storm we had on June 9th. This is not really high-quality and was just meant as an example how the blimp sounds when it’s flying overhead – you know it’s summer when you hear the familiar buzzing! I had no idea then that it would be the last chance I would get filming and photographing it :-(.

I’ve heard the familiar deep engine buzz several times in the last few days and saw it flying in the distance, but only today I had a chance to take the traditional first photo of our local WDL Blimp – and they have a new sponsor this year after they had to fly “solo” just with their own logo for a couple of years. It’s terribly expensive to actually fly with it, but the “Zeppelin” is one of the trademarks of our region and it’s always great too see it flying again after the winter hiatus.