There is a blimp wearing Vice City colors drifting south over America and you can watch it move in real time on the internet and of course, if it happens to pass by your area. The airship is a Goodyear ship registered as N3A, better known as Wingfoot Three. FlightAware lists its owner as the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. It left its hangar at Wingfoot Lake in Ohio this morning and tracked southeast, while airship watchers who photographed it say it now carries Grand Theft Auto VI branding and the words "Vice City" down its side. Rockstar Games has said nothing about it but it doesn't have to do. The internet is doing all the talking for it.
The first leg runs from Ohio to Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. FlightAware clocked an 8:37 AM EDT departure and an estimated arrival around 12:58 PM EDT, a trip of about 343 miles and four hours twenty minutes in the air. Mid-flight the ship was moving at roughly 66 mph, a touch under the 70 mph these airships top out at. Anyone can follow it by searching N3A on FlightAware.
Past Winston-Salem, posts in an airship-watcher Facebook group, the same ones that flagged the new look, say the ship is repositioning to Pompano Beach in Florida where Pompano Beach Airpark, Goodyear's only permanent airship base in Florida, running since 1979, is located. The ships do make temporary stops near Orlando and Daytona for events. A Zeppelin this slow does not cross half the country in a day, so the run south spans multiple days with overnight stops and a ground crew on the road following it closely. The exact intermediate stops and the rest of the schedule are not public. Neither Rockstar nor Goodyear has set out an official route.
The tracked first leg, Ohio to North Carolina
Detail | As tracked on FlightAware |
|---|---|
Aircraft | Wingfoot Three (N3A), a Goodyear Zeppelin NT |
Departed | Wingfoot Lake, Akron/Suffield, Ohio, 8:37 AM EDT, October 12 |
Headed to | Smith Reynolds Airport, Winston-Salem, North Carolina |
Estimated arrival | About 12:58 PM EDT |
Time in the air | Roughly 4 hours 21 minutes |
Distance | About 343 miles |
Cruising speed | Around 66 mph, near the 70 mph these airships top out at |
This leg is live tracking data from a legitimate source.
Interestingly, what most people call the Goodyear blimp is actually not a blimp. The Wingfoot Three is a semi-rigid Zeppelin NT, built around a lightweight internal frame rather than held in shape by gas pressure alone. Goodyear brands them as blimps anyway, but only six Zeppelins of this kind fly anywhere in the world, three with Goodyear in the United States and three in Germany. The thing carrying Vice City south is rarer than the game it is advertising.
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The blimp, or rather, the Zeppelin, is just the latest marketing push from Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive. Most recently, Rockstar pitched Miami-Dade on dressing its airport and port as Vice City, helped put a giant "Welcome to Vice City" sign on the Kaseya Center and tied the push to the real Miami locations the game recreates. A slow airship trailing Vice City across state lines fits, whoever is paying for it.
With that said, a blimp selling a video game in 2026 isn't something most could've foreseen or expected, which has pretty much been Rockstar's MO when it comes to marketing GTA 6, from working with a fashion magazine to dropping a trailer on Netflix.
Whether Rockstar planned it as a moment or Goodyear is simply moving a ship in paid livery, the effect is all the same. It moves at the speed of a bicycle, you can't skip it and it turns a ferry flight into something people screenshot and share.