N470 - The Zeppelin over Holland - [updated]

It kind of caught me by surprise, when I was searching through you tube the other day. There were many many videos of the Zeppelin NT with a weird N470 writing on it's envelope. Like this one "Zeppelin NT07 (N470) landing at Rotterdam Airport"

But this is by far not the only video, check out the related Videos that the Video player shows after the Video is done, or take a look over at Youtube at these Videos

• Zirkus Zeppelin @ Rotterdam Airport
• Aankomst NT504 Zeppelin Rotterdam
• Sandman @ Zirkus Zeppelin

A little search quickly turns up the Page http://www.zirkuszeppelin.nl. Zirkus Zeppelin is from what I understand an Artproject by Florentijn Hofman about the N470 Highway in the province Zuid-Holland. As far as I understand Florentijn selected 470 people who life around the N470 or where involved during the construction of the highway to fly on the Zeppelin. They should take pictures and share their stories of the experience of the flight along the N470, all this will then be published in an illustrated book. We are going to Contact Florentijn Hoffman and Zeppelin for more information about this project. For now I invite you to check out all these Flickr images taken on the Flights along the N470

From what I could read on the Zirkus Zeppelin website the Zeppelin NT was only flying for about a week in the Netherlands but all those pictures taken prove it once again. An Airship of whatever kind is a very efficient marketing instrument that reaches many thousand people in a short amount of time and seeing an airship usually leads to positive reactions by the people who see it. We will be featuring more information about the effectiveness of Airships in marketing soon. So keep an eye out and check back regularly.

[Update]We got a reply from Florentijn Hofman, we basically got it right, so our skills in deciphering foreign languages without the tiniest bit of knowledge about them aren't so bad after all. Here is a short excerpt of the Mail we got back

...
I wanted to show people the road and the area around the road from a perspective architects draw their plans.
With a zeppelin you bring another layer into the project, spectaculair, the right speed to read the landscape and the history around zeppelins included.
Those issues makes the choice for renting this zeppelin clear and much better than a helicopter or plane or balloon. (this last one was also no option while a wanted to bring 470 people up in the sky).
...

According to Florentijn the financing of the project was possible because the province which built the N470 took 1% of the cost of the highway construction to art and from that budget the NT could be rented.