Best view of Quail Hollow? From 1,000 feet above

If you catch a ride with Evan DeWan to Quail Hollow Club to sneak a peek at the Wells Fargo Championship, you won’t have to worry about traffic, or parking, or not being able to see over the person in front of you.

The one thing you will have to worry about? Wind.

“This kind of flying is the last true seat-of-your-pants-type flying,” says DeWan, 32, one of the pilots of MetLife’s Snoopy One blimp. “You have to feel what the airship is doing. You have to know how to interpret the wind. When you’re up in the air in this thing, you’re a cottonseed in the wind. Even the smallest winds really do affect you, so you have to plan accordingly.”

DeWan and Snoopy One’s 12 other crew members arrived in North Carolina on Wednesday, anchoring the 120-foot craft in a field at Gastonia Airport. It has two missions here: The first is simply to fly around, serving as an aerial advertisement for both MetLife and 20th Century Fox’s “The Peanuts Movie” (the latter decal was recently added to the driver’s side of the blimp).

The second is to provide images of the action at Quail Hollow for The Golf Channel and CBS via a $400,000 camera that has a 340-degree field of view, a 4,000-millimeter zoom lens, and image stabilization that keeps shots still even when wind is rocking Snoopy One like a cruise ship in a tropical storm.

“We follow golf balls, we set up holes, we’ll take a putt if all the ground cameras are blocked,” says cameraman Bob Mikkelson, who has been shooting golf from the sky for 29 years. “We can do things, obviously, that they can’t do on the ground, and that’s the value of it. And then the ground cameras can obviously do things that I can’t do. So it’s a great complement, and over the years it’s become a very key camera for golf coverage. There’s no other way to get that big, wide shot of the course.”

On Friday morning, however, the camera was detached from its rig and the blimp became a sightseeing vessel for a few hours. DeWan and his two passengers were lifted up off the Gastonia airfield by 58,000 cubic feet of helium and 240 pounds of fuel, then steamed toward Lake Wylie, steering wide of Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

“I can’t point out any landmarks,” DeWan says, apologizing. That’s because this is the former Army Black Hawk pilot’s first visit to Charlotte. He owns a home in Maryland, but he almost never sees it because he is always with the blimp.

Snoopy One actually flies from place to place, from job to job; it’s rarely deflated because helium is so expensive, and even though it is the smallest of Van Wagner Airship Group’s six blimps, the ship is far too massive to travel on the bed of a tractor-trailer.

Top speed is 40 mph, although “sometimes in a tailwind, you can do 50,” DeWan says. Most of the time, it floats at an altitude of about 1,000 feet, but it can climb as high as 6,000 and occasionally – on a hot day in the high desert, for instance – it may travel just 10 feet off the ground.

As Quail Hollow Club came into view Friday, DeWan ascended to 1,600 feet. Second-round action was in progress, and he wanted to keep the engine noise away from the golfers.

Down on the ground, his work and his etiquette is appreciated by the pros.

“It’s up there getting nice footage of us, so it doesn’t bother me at all,” says Will MacKenzie, who shot a 68 Friday to move to 7-under for the tournament. “Don’t even hear it or really realize it’s there.”

There’s another reason the golfers want it there, whether they realize it or not.

“I always tell everybody: As long as the blimp is in the air, the weather is going to be good,” says Lance Barrow, coordinating producer of football and golf for CBS. “Once the blimp leaves, you better watch out.”

It’s not just the weather, though, that might cause Snoopy One to disappear from above the tournament. Pilots and the TV folks also might let the blimp wander off to capture other vistas of Charlotte.

“We gave them shots of downtown and Carowinds yesterday,” says chief pilot Terry Dillard, DeWan’s boss. “But we can’t shoot your football stadium because it’s ... Bank of America. This is (the) Wells Fargo (tournament). You can’t show anything Bank of America.”

After getting clearance from air traffic control on Friday to head from Quail Hollow to uptown, the blimp comes in for a lap around the city, and you realize it’s too bad they can’t get that shot. The view of Bank of America Stadium – and many other towering concrete landmarks – is fit for a postcard.

Two hours into the blimp ride, everything about the experience still feels fresh and new and wonderful.

But DeWan will assure you: “It gets boring.”

There’s only one place he doesn’t seem to ever tire of.

“Snoopy One spends the winter in Florida, and along the beach is the best,” he says. “You fly right off shore, and you can see through the water. Sea turtles, dolphins, sharks ... sharks 10 feet from people, and they don’t even know it. You wish you could tell them, ‘There’s a shark behind you!’ But you can’t.” Staff writer David Scott contributed.

This story was originally published May 15, 2015 at 6:44 PM with the headline "Best view of Quail Hollow? From 1,000 feet above."