Today I did tourist things, and went on a tour of the Boeing Factory in Everett, WA.
Where I was not run over by an aircraft engine, despite how this looks.
As you can see, this is merely part of a display of Bloody Great Engines.
And a section of aircraft fuselage used for testing.
Well, previously used for testing; I suspect it’s main use now is so that you can compare the modern composite to the section of aluminium fuselage in green next to it, and marvel at how many rivets there aren’t.
Also a display or two on the fine work available in custom fit-out work by Boeing; BBJ standing for Boeing Business Jets.
And nothing else.
I’d have enquired about prices, but my credit card was back at the hostel, in my locker.
There was also a ‘Family’ section, where one could hypothetically play with building carbon nanotubes from giant rubber shapes, or using magnets on ferrous nanomaterial fluid to see what they do with particles of differing sizes, or playing with Bernoulli’s Principle using an airstream and ping-pong balls.
Hypothetically.
Up on the roof, they had some pretty spectacular views of their airfield, and also of Mt. Baker, which was being unusually visible.
There’s an Antonov AN-124 in this shot … somewhere … which was delivering parts.
From the bus, we could see the stair/ladder to the flight deck un-retracting into the cargo space. Which is basically the whole inside of the aircraft.
A little further around was the Dreamlifter facility, but without a plane it’s sort of lacking in context.
Really big plane, based on a 747, looks like this;
And that’s where the photos end.
No photography allowed on the factory tour. Nor cellphones, nor electronic devices of any kind.
The tour ends by exiting through the gift shop, so you can keep your wallet.
The factory is huge.
The doors are size of football fields. Which sort? It doesn’t matter, the answer’s “yes”.
Access was via people & service tunnels under the working area, then up in big-ass freight elevators to galleries.
I suspect that there are any number of images and videos online which will paint a far better picture of what it’s like inside the largest building in the world than I can, so I’ll go for the vibe.
It’s not built on a human scale. It’s a machine into which people work, taking parts and assembling them within that machine into steadily larger and more complicated things, on jigs and systems so big that it takes time to figure out what they’re doing, if you can manage it at all. From the far end of this machine, aircraft emerge; Maybe one every month, maybe more frequently than that, or maybe one every 2½ days.
From one gallery we could look down into a cubicle farm, itself on a mezzanine level over the assembly floor. From another, we could see a row of workstations on a slow-moving platform transporting the nose & tail sections of the plane down one side of the room, whereupon they’d be joined together and cone back along the other side, to emerge as a finished-ish aircraft.
The paint shop was over the other side of a highway, so the planes are towed across a little bridge, usually at night to cut down on the rubberneck factor.
It’s a hell of a place. Also, there were some cargo trikes in evidence, for transport purposes, which … is nice. They may be building ridiculously high-tech aircraft with windows where you can select the darkness/opacity level using a little switch, but a bike is still the easiest way to get around.
