GTA 6's Vice City blimp is real: a Goodyear airship is flying to Florida
A Goodyear blimp carrying GTA VI 'VICE CITY' livery lifted off from Goodyear's Akron, Ohio base on October 12, 2026, and FlightAware flight data shows its first stop is Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — 552 km (298 nautical miles) away — before it continues to Pompano Beach, Florida, as reported by RockstarINTEL and first flagged by the GTA Online News account. The aircraft
The short answer
A Grand Theft Auto VI airship is no longer only inside the game. A real Goodyear blimp has been wrapped in "VICE CITY" branding and is heading for Florida, according to photographs circulating in the Goodyear Blimp Fan Club Facebook group and relayed by RockstarINTEL on October 12, 2026. It is the first time the franchise's fictional airship has been carried as livery on a real Goodyear airship.
What the photographs show
RockstarINTEL identifies the aircraft as Wingfoot Three (N3A), a Goodyear Zeppelin LZ N07-101. Rebecca Trussel was the first to share a picture of the aircraft with "VICE CITY" text on its sides, per the report; Cecil Richmond and Jim Cassatt then added photographs taken outside and inside its hangar, and Roger Durfee photographed the takeoff, which shows the GTA VI logo on the blimp's underside. At the time RockstarINTEL published, the airship had just lifted off. According to James W. Ward, quoted in the same piece, Wingfoot Three was scheduled to fly from the Goodyear Airdock in Akron, Ohio, to Pompano Beach, Florida.
1,638 km — and why it cannot be one flight
The route is longer than the airship's own range allows, and the numbers make that plain. Measured straight-line between the Goodyear Airdock in Akron (40.93°N, 81.45°W) and Pompano Beach (26.24°N, 80.12°W), the distance is about 1,638 km (1,018 miles). Wingfoot Three is a Zeppelin LZ N07-101, and the type's published specifications give it a range of 900 km, a cruise speed of 115 km/h (71 mph) and an endurance of up to 24 hours (Wikipedia, Zeppelin NT). At cruise speed the trip works out to roughly 14 hours of flying — but 1,638 km is about 82% beyond a single 900 km leg, so the transit has to be broken into at least two hops with refuelling stops. The destination is Goodyear's Florida base, roughly 50 km north of Miami, the real-world city Vice City is modelled on.
Flight data confirms the first stop: Winston-Salem, not Miami
The transit is no longer only a photograph. FlightAware's tracking record for the airship's registration N3A shows a flight filed on October 12, 2026 from Wingfoot Lake Airship Operations (4OH6), Goodyear's Akron base, to Smith Reynolds Airport (KINT) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — a filed direct distance of 298 nautical miles, or 552 km. The actual takeoff is logged at 12:37 UTC (08:37 local) and the estimated landing at 16:58 UTC (12:58 local), with a planned en-route time of 4 hours 32 minutes. The fan account GTA Online News was first to report the stop; the FlightAware filing confirms it independently.
The first leg is comfortable rather than a test of limits: at 552 km it covers about 61% of the 900 km published range of the Zeppelin LZ N07. The filing also settles the shape of the route. Akron to Winston-Salem measures 544 km on a great-circle line, and Winston-Salem to Pompano Beach 1,100 km — a combined 1,644 km, about 0.4% longer than the 1,638 km direct line, so the stop costs the airship almost nothing in detour.
The rest is arithmetic. The remaining 1,100 km is roughly 22% beyond a single 900 km leg, so if the fleet's published range is the operative limit, the airship needs a third leg before it reaches Florida — a stop confirmed by tracking data, not by an announcement. RockstarINTEL's takeoff photographs add a detail for anyone who ends up standing underneath: the GTA VI logo is printed on the underside of the envelope, the surface a blimp actually shows to the ground.
Three airships, and a very short list
Wingfoot Three is one of only three Zeppelin NTs Goodyear has operated since it retired its older, non-rigid blimps. Goodyear confirmed the partnership with Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik in May 2011 and ordered three LZ N07-101s; per Wikipedia's Goodyear Blimp fleet history, they entered service between 2014 and 2018 — Wingfoot One (unveiled in 2014, stationed at Pompano Beach), Wingfoot Two (maiden flight in 2016, stationed at Carson, California) and Wingfoot Three (maiden flight on 25 June 2018, tied to Goodyear's Ohio base). The manufacturer has built only seven Zeppelin NTs in total. A Goodyear airship is therefore a scarce advertising surface: there are three of them in the world, and one now wears Vice City.
The blimp already exists inside GTA VI
The real airship answers something in the game. A blimp appears in GTA VI's first trailer, and RockstarINTEL notes the expectation that it will be in the finished game and flyable. Third-party vehicle databases that track datamined listings describe the in-game airship as modelled on the Goodyear GZ-20 — the older non-rigid blimp Goodyear flew before the Zeppelin NTs — and list four seats (GTALAB). That is fan-catalogued data, not something Rockstar has confirmed.
In 2013 Rockstar borrowed the blimp. In 2026 the blimp carries Vice City
The direction of the tie-in has flipped. For Grand Theft Auto V (2013), Rockstar put a Goodyear-inspired airship inside the game: the Atomic Blimp, described by IGN and the GTA Wiki as the first flyable blimp in the series, a pre-order bonus modelled on the Goodyear GZ-20 and later joined by the Xero Blimp in the Enhanced version. This time the game does not imitate the blimp; the blimp carries the game. Goodyear has made no official announcement, and the branding is visible so far only in enthusiast photographs — but the reversal is the point: a promotion that used to live on a screen is now 75 metres long and floating over South Florida.
The launch campaign has left the screen
The airship is the third real-world surface of GTA VI's launch push to become public. On September 10-11, Miami Beach's commission voted 4-3 to approve a campaign worth roughly $3-4 million, worded to show only "VI" and "Vice City" on beach furniture operated by Boucher Brothers, running from October 15 through December 31, 2026. A separate private deal put a rooftop sign reading "Welcome to Vice City (VI)" on the Kaseya Center, the Miami Heat's arena. The beach campaign was drafted to be discreet; a branded airship drifting over South Florida is the opposite, and the one asset that costs passers-by nothing to photograph.
What is not confirmed
Rockstar and Take-Two have said nothing, and Goodyear has not announced the livery either — the only evidence so far is user photographs from an enthusiast group. It is not known whether the airship will appear at launch events, how long it will remain in Florida, or whether the branding is tied to any feature in the game. The schedule itself is weather-dependent: airships stay grounded in strong wind, so the published destination is a plan rather than a timetable. GTA VI is set for release on November 19, 2026, on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
