People driving by McAlester regional airport recently may have seen a flash of green or white bouncing on the breeze.  If they slowed and investigated, they may have realized the flash came from a sight familiar at professional and college football games, but not in most other places.

The Fujifilm blimp was moored at the airport this morning after the craft landed to allow the crew to rest, according to Joshua Spurway, a member of the airship's 20-person crew which helps fly and maintain the aircraft.  It was on its way from Arlington, Texas to Fayetteville, N.C.

Secured by its bow to a truck-mounted portable mooring mast, which was itself secured by eight guy lines, the 197-foot airship rose and fell, then shifted to the east and west as the wind changed direction slightly this morning.  The guy lines were secured with 16 metal stakes, each five feet long and driven four feet into the ground.

"We had planned to take off early this morning,: Spurway said.  "But with these winds, we may not be able to take off until at least noon, if then."

Although the aircraft can take off or land in relatively strong winds, its crew has to take the wind into account at all times.  At one stop in west Texas, Spurway said, the crew tried to take off three times but the winds were so strong the modified Porsche 930 engines couldn't move it forward.  "The pilots also have to calculate what the winds are like at our destination," Spurway said.  "If they're too bad, we don't go."  The crew includes pilots, engineers, mechanics and others.  Two pilots on the ground relieve them when they need a break.

The FujiFilm blimp, which is a Skyship 600 model, also has room to carry eight passengers.  It, and a blimp used by College.com, are the largest of their kind presently being used, Spurway said.

How does it feel to ride in one?

"They're like a cross between riding in an airplane and riding in a boat," Spurway said.  With a normal cruising speed of 30 to 50 mph, the airship uses about eight gallons of aviation fuel per hour.  According to Airship Management Services Inc. of Greenwich, Conn., the blimp uses less fuel in a week than a 747 uses to move away from the gate of an airport to a runway.

The ship is filled with 250,000 cubic feet of helium, a non-flammable, lighter-than-air gas.  As helium warms, it expands, so the pilots use tow compartments - called ballonets - filled with a air to relieve some of the pressure on the blimp.

Since the helium is normally kept at a relatively low pressure, a hole in the envelope which makes up the balloon portion of the blimp doesn't mean the airship is going to crash.  In fact, tests in 1994 by the British Ministry of Defence fired hundreds of bullets into airship envelopes which still took hours to deflate, according to Airship Management Services.

Airships of the past, like the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg, were often much larger, with a rigid metal skeleton and were filled with the much more dangerous hydrogen, a flammable gas.  The Hindenburg, for example, was 804 feet long, held aloft by 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen and carried more than 90 passengers and crew.  In 1937 the Hindenburg burst into flames and crashed, killing 37 of the 91 people aboard.

Once widely used for transportation and military purposes, most of the airships seen today are used for advertising, flying an average 2,000 to 3,000 feet above the ground at football games.