By Jack Ferguson

Kate Board likes to float. If she could, she would just float around all day in her ship, perhaps watching a whale pod glide across her bow or the Golden Gate bridge glitter silently in the last rays of a winter sunset. Most days, this is exactly what she does. At 246 feet, her ship is longer than a 747 and Kate is the only female in the world licensed to caption this massive craft. Standing only 5 feet 2 inches tall—and a girl, as she likes to point out—Kate, of Canterbury, England, is the kind of person that could be an ace fighter pilot, nuclear submarine caption or personal assistant to the Queen. She happens to be an airship pilot, however, flying the Zeppelin NT N407XX. Otherwise known as Eureka, it is one of three in existence worldwide. Based at Moffett Field, in Sunnyvale Calif., the mighty vehicle is owned by Airship Ventures, a start-up aviation company formed in 2006 by husband-and-wife team Matt and Alex Hall. The German-built Zeppelin offers sightseeing tours, private charters and anything else an airship makes sense for in the San Francisco bay area and north-central California coast.

“I love my job. I love floating around San Francisco and Monterey and the California coast and making people happy,” says Kate in a rolling British accent that should be part of the Zeppelin licensing requirements by the FAA. Kate, only 33 years old, has nearly 5,000 hours floating things that through the sky. Prior to joining the newly formed team at Airship Ventures, and before a very brief stint in the British Merchant Navy (no tattoos acquired), she flew the MetLife blimp back and forth across the U.S. as an advertising and camera platform, covering “lots of golf,” as she says. Before that, she worked for Virgin flying blimps over continental Europe and Britain.

She got her lighter than air (LTA) start on the ground crew with Virgin and really never dreamed of being an airship pilot—which is probably not that uncommon among the roughly 40 active airships pilots around the world. “It was like most things in aviation, right place at the right time,” she says. “I was working at Virgin, and they knew I liked flying as I had my private fixed wing rating, and so I was asked to try out for a blimp pilot position. Flying a blimp is fairly demanding physically and women airship pilots just didn’t exist at that point, so they weren’t certain I could cut it,” says Kate with a slight roll of the eyes. Well, she cut it and the rest is history. With more than 4,500 hours in blimps she is one of the most experienced airship pilots in the world and the only female Zeppelin NT pilot in existence. The NT, in Zeppelin NT, stands for “new technology.” The new generation of these sky ships is an elegant blind of modern avionics, engine technology, safety features and, perhaps most critical, precision German engineering coupled with the now centuries old technology of floating weight through the sky.

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