For Valentine's Day Layla got tickets for the factory tour over at the Boeing plant in Everett. It turns out that Everett—much like a number of other cities in Washington which aren't Seattle—happens to look an awful lot like Roswell, New Mexico. Eerie.
Back to the point: the Boeing plant is huge. Really unbelievably huge. The plant where the 747s, 767s, 777s, and 787s are built (yes, all of them) is essentially one giant building 0.7 miles long and 105 feet tall. The main 777 assembly area has a good three 777s already assembled inside with another two or three fuselage parts lying against one wall. It's aboslutely unfathamoable how large this building is, even when you're inside; our part of the tour took place 4 stories above the factory floor, and it still didn't seem that tall. I'm really damned sure that I didn't get the full impression of how large it was.
In another oddity, the parking outside the Boeing visitor center is all asphalt...except the parking spaces, which are grass. Oh, and you can't park in some of the spaces because they're blocked off—presumably to save the dying grass. Brilliant.
Note: the picture at the top of this article isn't one I took—we actually weren't allowed to take any cameras (or cell phones, or "MP3s," etc.) into the factory because it supposedly creates a safety problem. The tour guide mentioned that dropped cameras have caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage before. So anyway, I'll post pictures of the outside of the building once I've got them off the camera.
Sweet! Did you get to see any of them riveting? Did they have any cool equipment to do this? Oooh jealousy.
Danny
That looks pretty cool! I should go up there with Bonnie sometime. Planes are cool. :)
Danny: Oh man was it sweet—we got to see an unpainted 777 (sans engines) from overhead. Since it was a Saturday, most of the workers were off...but we did catch a dozen or so guys (three or four in lab coats) doing some sort of electrical work on the plane.
Also cool: apparantely the 747 had to be pushed into the air to test the landing gear—but the 777 can simply be parked so all the wheels are on elevators. They put pylons under the hardpoints, drop the elevators from under the wheels, and work the gear silly.
Oh, and the 787 Dreamliner is supposed to be assembled in 3 days, as opposed to 3–6 months.
I'll tell you right now that between the Everett facility and the Museum of Flight, it's absolutely positively worth a trip to Seattle.
Shippy: Oh yes. Highly recommended.