Crew works to bring new blimp into being

It will join two others active in the company's North American fleet.
AKRON (AP) -- Filling with helium, the stretched-out piece of two-ply neoprene polyester fabric lying on the cold concrete floor inside Goodyear Tire & amp; Rubber Co.'s Wingfoot Lake hangar began to take shape.
A huge net weighed down by ballast bags kept the force of 180,000 cubic feet of helium from lifting Goodyear's newest airship into the hangar ceiling.
The birth of a new blimp requires vast floor space, a polyester envelope, lots of gas and eight tons of weights.
The Goodyear blimp is one of the most widely recognized corporate icons in the world and a key marketing tool for the company, the world's largest tire maker. Goodyear has two active blimps in its North American fleet: the Spirit of Goodyear based in nearby Suffield and the Carson, Calif.-based Spirit of America.
The 192-foot-long blimp will replace the Stars & amp; Stripes, which crashed in June during a storm in Florida. The new one hasn't been named.
Controlled inflation
Before inflating the new blimp for the first time Wednesday, crews patched 63 tiny holes in the envelope. Scott Babbo, project superintendent, began by opening a valve part way on the rear of a tractor-trailer holding 11 long metal tubes of highly compressed helium. The gas had been produced in Oklahoma and refined in Middletown, north of Cincinnati.
"We're just letting a trickle go through so we don't get a big helium bubble up front," Babbo said.
As the helium hissed through a Goodyear-brand hose to the front of the envelope, a special vacuum sucked the remaining air out of the aft end.
The net and ballast bags helped the crew control the filling process. As the envelope filled up, crew members on each side carefully unhooked bags from the net and moved the hooks down one or two places. That let the envelope slowly fill out its entire length.
"You want to control the bubble as it builds," said Ron Dunay, manager of the airship repair station. "You don't want to take a chance of it slipping out from under the net."
The crew needed to keep the envelope as flat as possible so that it filled evenly, said construction supervisor Jared Haren.
He walked around the envelope to monitor its progress and direct the crew members adjusting the ballast bags and netting.