The three, and 600 co-workers, are part of an enormous advertising convoy that precedes the Tour de France, as the world's greatest bicycle race takes three weeks to circumnavigate more than 2,200 miles of France as well as slices of Switzerland and Germany.
That may be the benchmark inside Iraq, where people long ago started to rail against the enormous, slow-moving American convoys that used to snarl traffic, and the often interminable delays at checkpoints manned by US soldiers.
Today's airship designers share a vision: magnificent amounts of trucking going on in the sky — regular convoys of enormous airships carrying timber, coal, wind turbines, prefabricated homes, or an entire summer harvest, puttering gently along at about a hundred miles an hour, ten thousand feet over our heads.
As Jeanne Marie Laskas writes in this week's issue of the magazine, "Today's airship designers share a vision: magnificent amounts of trucking going on in the sky regular convoys of enormous airships carrying timber, coal, wind turbines, prefabricated homes, or an entire summer harvest, puttering gently along at about a hundred miles an hour, ten thousand feet over our heads".
He was traveling by convoy when the enormous bomb, thought to have been made up of more than 100 pounds of explosives, shattered the morning calm of Friday, the main prayer day of the Muslim week and a day off from work for most.
Shortly after noon, a small convoy of cars arrived, led by an enormous black S.U.V. (a G.M.C. Yukon this time, not a Hummer), and Schwarzenegger, obscured by a vibrating scrum of cameras, cops, and kids, dashed into the building.
It's a convoy of 200 metric tons of supplies, which is an enormous load.
I've seen a convoy of prefabricated homes go by and flatbed trucks piled with enormous pipes.
If you're an aviation geek, check out the Tillamook Air Museum, inside an enormous hangar built to house K-class airships used during World War II for anti-submarine patrol and convoy escort.
Protected by an armada of helicopters, Bradley tanks, Humvees and bulletproof Land Cruisers, the convoy looked like the makings of some kind of space program, but in fact it carried sections of an enormous generator, financed by American taxpayers, to upgrade the Iraqi power grid.
