We had comped admission to the tour — I’ve got an assignment to write about Seattle from a Jet City perspective.
There’s something super freaky about looking down upon jumbo jets as they’re being built. The huge birds still look enormous and my brain struggled with the scale. Then, to think that entire sections of the planes actually arrive, fully assembled, inside other planes? What? How does that even make sense? The Dreamlifter looks like a plane that swallowed another plane, and that seems… impossible.
There’s a good deal of “Boeing is best” propaganda on the tour, but that’s not surprising, it’s their facility. “Next time you’re at the airport checking in, tell the desk agent, ‘If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.'” I have a marked preference for Airbus having nothing to do with mechanicals. I’m ignorant of that stuff, but in my experience Airbus planes have better, more comfortable interiors. I now know that says more about the carrier than the builder — the interior is built to the carrier’s spec, so if the seats are too narrow, blame the airlines, not the builder. That said, there was prototyped cross section of the Dreamliner’s coach seating on the exhibit floor and i was singularly unimpressed by the limited recline and legroom.
Whining about coach aside, I was genuinely inspired by the scale of the work done at the Everett factory. When you have a building that makes its own weather, well, that’s big. Boeing also does a very good job of reminding visitors that flight, which we take for granted, gives us access in a day to places that used to take us months to reach. I’m good with cognitive dissonance; I can hate the middle seat while still feeling that it’s downright miraculous that I can get from Seattle to Vienna in less than a day.
Practical things about visiting the factory…
Photography is not allowed — bummer, right? — so you need to leave your devices in the car or in the lockers in the lobby. When you’re on the tour, it’s a huge hassle to find a bathroom, so use the one at the visitor’s center before you go to the theater for the opening presentation. The visitor’s center alone isn’t really worth the price of admission, while it’s cool to stand next to that tail fin or to see the big Rolls Royce engines up close, if you want a museum visit, head to the Museum of Flight in south Seattle instead — it’s great. The onsite cafeteria is… unimpressive, which is funny when you hear about the massive amounts of concessions onsite in the factory — apparently, Tully’s Coffee has a hugely profitable operation at Boeing. There’s a height requirement for the little ones — essentially, they have to be able to see over the rail on the observation decks so they’re not tempted to climb on things. If you don’t have a car, getting to Boeing via public transit is an absurdly epic haul so consider booking a tour that includes transit from downtown Seattle. Booking your ticket online directly from the Future of Flight does NOT include transportation, so look at Tours Northwest or Show Me Seattle. If you have a larger group, you might consider renting a car for the day just to make the run up and back — it takes about an hour to make the drive.
Airplane geeks would probably find repeat visits to the factory worth their while — you get to see what’s coming off the line sitting in the lot outside the factory, and you get to see what’s brand new in production. Anyone who’s done any time in a plane will find it worth visiting once, absolutely. In a time when we argue with the TSA agents at checkpoints, get nickeled and dimed by airlines, and those people are on your flight right behind you, gawd, are they going to swear about investment banking the whole time, it’s good to be reminded of what an unlikely and miraculous thing it is that we can fly.
Comedian Louis CK on flying. Contains profanity and other offensive stuff. You’ve been warned.
Photo courtesy of Boeing Future of Flight Flickr stream
My father was one of the first to work in that huge building, back when they were building the first 747. He loved working on that plane. Most of the projects he had worked on (at Lockheed in Burbank, Calif.) were war planes. You can see some of them (including the Blackbird) at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.