HILLSBORO, Ore. -- Jim Thiele is building giant bumper stickers in the sky.
His blimps, lighted internally like jack-o'-lanterns, hover over sporting events around the world, hawking cars and beer and life insurance.
Of the approximately two dozen airships aloft, Thiele's American Blimp Corp., with offices in Hillsboro and Severna Park, is responsible for 19.
ABC blimps are different. Smaller. Brighter. Hipper. Just right for advertising.
ABC airships have carried the logos of Coca-Cola, Nokia, Met Life (the Snoopy balloon), Blockbuster Video and Budweiser while also providing aerial TV coverage of major sporting events around the world.
Blimps are crowd pleasers, as Goodyear long ago demonstrated. The rubber company has three full-size blimps stationed around the country and turns down thousands of requests for appearances each year.
But even Goodyear has downsized. It leased one of the smaller blimps for the 1998 Super Bowl and has three others overseas.
Thiele, an aerospace engineer and accomplished balloonist, agrees with the old saying that blimps "make people smile and dogs bark."
"It's as close as you can get to a magic carpet ride," says the 41-year-old, soft-spoken tinkerer who built his first hot-air balloon while in high school.
As a boy, Thiele dreamed of building a smaller airship but assumed that by the time he was old enough to do so, someone would have beaten him to it.
By 1987, no one had, so Thiele opened ABC with two goals: lower the cost of blimps to make them affordable advertising vehicles; and make them portable so that every component could fit through the cargo door of a Boeing 747.
"I didn't have much, so I could afford to lose everything," he says. "The worst thing that could happen is I could go bankrupt and wind up working for someone else again."
Full-size blimps, like those operated by Goodyear, don't easily come apart, making overseas advertising or lease arrangements difficult.
At 130 feet, Thiele's blimps are two-thirds the size of a Goodyear blimp and require a much smaller ground crew. Gondolas have hollow-tubed frames covered by a thin fiberglass skin to save weight.
ABC's prototype -- "a throw-away," Thiele calls it -- flew for the first time in Phoenix in April 1988 and kept on flying tests until it racked up 1,000 hours.
In 1990, Thiele set up shop in Seattle to be near the Federal Aviation Administration office that would certify his blimp design.
"I wanted to make it a concrete relationship. I wanted them to know we weren't crackpots but serious engineers with a serious product," he says.
In May 1990, the FAA gave its blessing to the A-60, a four-seater with room for a pilot, a salesman, a prospect and his guest.
"If we couldn't take a prospect up, we couldn't sell it," Thiele says.
With flight certification in hand, Thiele moved to Hillsboro, about 30 minutes outside Portland. In July 1991, he got FAA authorization to build blimps.
In the case of Thiele's airships, beauty is skin deep.
The gas bag is translucent, back-lighted by two mercury vapor bulbs and splashed with the client's logo in any of 32 colors -- a far cry from the gray airships with blinking light bulbs on the sides.
The rip-stop nylon logos are attached with bungee cords and Velcro, in case the owner has a change of heart or a merger alters the corporate name.
Thiele's creations, called Lightships, attracted the attention of Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines and Virgin Records.
"Branson wanted to be in advertising but didn't want to be in the manufacturing business. Our first three blimps went to him," Thiele says.
In 1995, the two men formed a leasing partnership, the Lightship Group, based in Orlando, Fla., and Telford in Britain.
Through the partnership, Thiele hopes to open the skies to sightseers. He recently rolled out a 10-seat airship called the Lightship A-150.
"You can buy a plane ride, a helicopter ride, a hot-air balloon ride. You can't go anywhere to buy a blimp ride," he says.
Thiele admits he gets defensive when people talk about his "little blimps" as if they are toys.
"People don't sit around the kitchen table designing helicopters, but they act like that's how you design an airship," he says, gesturing at a stack of technical manuals 5 inches thick on the A-150. "A blimp is as complicated as a helicopter."
Three years ago, ABC opened an office in Severna Park to try to crack a market that has been the almost exclusive domain of helicopters for decades: military and law-enforcement applications.
"I'm here in Severna Park because almost all of America's money is just west of here," says company Vice President Jud Brandreth, laughing.
"Airships are a very stable, long-endurance, low-cost aerial platform," he says.
But he cautions that with prices starting at $1.25 million, blimps aren't going to be in the arsenals of many local police departments.
"In Baltimore, Washington and New York, with traffic and crime problems, they provide a stable command post that can stay aloft all night without refueling and carry heavier, more sophisticated night-vision equipment than a helicopter," he explains.
Those qualities, Brandreth says, might also make blimps attractive to border patrols, forest-fire fighters, coast guards and foreign nations in need of an airborne radar platform but unable to pay $500 million for an airborne-warning-and-control-system plane.
But ABC hasn't landed that first contract yet. Brandreth blames it on "old wives' tales" that blimps explode, or pop like a balloon if they get a hole in the skin or break apart in the slightest storm.
All of these activities keep Thiele, the balloonist, grounded.
"I'm going to have at this as long as there's development to be done -- that's the passion for me," he says, leaning forward, gesturing enthusiastically. "It's going on, proving the technology, finding new materials, opening the skies to new possibilities."
Pub Date: 3/24/99