NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2026 Oct 1, 13:36 -0700
Frank Reed you wrote:"I just spotted something at flightradar24.com. What flies from Silicon Valley and passes over the Golden Gate Bridge at 1000 feet altitude flying 37 knots and gets a circular icon in the app?"
On FR24 a red dot usually means Lighter Than Air. I.e. a balloon or airship. Pathfinder 1 is special, because it's the first large-size rigid airship built for many years. It's also the largest aircraft in the World. You can read about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_1_(airship) .
You also wrote: "OFF-TOPIC: no navigation." That's not necessarily so. The British rigid airship R34 was the first aircraft to fly from Europe to the USA in 1919, and the German airship Graf Zeppelin was the first airship to fly round the World in 1929 alongside its many other long distance navigational accomplishments. DaveP
