And if it got close enough, you'd want to touch it.

Oh, yes you would.

Knowing that, the men who “fly” the radio-controlled mini-blimp that circles the air space at Connecticut Sun games in Mohegan Sun Arena make sure to keep it away from acquisitive fans in the balcony seats.

“That's the one thing we've got to watch out for,” says Dennis Duplice, president of RC Propbusters, the Salem-based club that handles the mini-blimp for the WNBA team. “They're worried that somebody in the upper deck could fall out.”

“They” is the Mohegan Tribe, which, according to Bruce Cohn, game operations manager for the Connecticut Sun, puts safety above all else when it comes to the blimp. The same holds true, he says, for the cannons that fire rolled-up T-shirts into the crowd at halftime.

You've got to send those T-shirts at least 12 rows deep.

As for the mini-blimp, it can't cause much damage so long as it stays well out of the reach of the fans on high — even if it drifts off course, say, and crashes into a player warming up before the start of a game.  “I felt so bad about that,” Duplice says, recalling an incident last season, the blimp's first. “At least I wasn't really flying.”  When he's really flying, Duplice pilots corporate jets for Electric Boat.

At the controls of the mini-blimp, he says, “You've got to stay two steps ahead” of where it might be headed, constantly correcting for the air currents that toss it about. There is, after all, no lead in this zeppelin, only helium.

A tail rotor propels the 12-foot-long craft, and two rotors on either side of a turret that's Velcro-ed to its underside keep it aloft. A handful of RC Propbusters members take turns driving, manipulating the controls on a hand-held console. One of the toggle switches controls a corkscrew that extends from the back of the turret, dispensing coupons redeemable for Contessa food products. With each turn of the corkscrew, a few coupons fall.

Contessa, one of the Connecticut Sun's corporate sponsors, owns the blimp, a key component of the ancillary entertainment that surrounds Sun games. Mini-blimps, T-shirt cannons, rotating message boards, national-anthem singers and dancers are all part of the package, says Cohn, who's responsible for what he calls the “other game — the stuff that goes on when basketball's not.”

Cohn went to the Internet to find someone who could operate the blimp.

“We didn't want an intern doing it,” he says. “Mastering the blimp involves a lot of trial-and-error. You have to find what works and what doesn't.”

His research turned up the RC Propbusters, a 70-year-old organization that boasts 144 members and long-time affiliation with the Academy of Model Aeronautics.

“They know what they're doing,” Cohn says.

In exchange for flying the mini-blimp, club members occasionally get to loose their radio-controlled planes inside the arena, as they did one night a few weeks ago after breaking out the little dirigible for the first time this season. An exhibition game a week later served as a sort of dress rehearsal. The Sun's home-opener Saturday against the Los Angeles Sparks is the real deal.

As always, the guys at the controls will be trying not to hit anything. “Which,” Duplice says, “would be a lot easier if there was no wind.”

But wind there will be. Air-conditioning you know.

“It's like flying in a hurricane,” he says.