Family day at Boeing

Boeing Everett Site

Can you imagine a building so large that all of Disneyland and California Adventure would fit into it, with room left-over for 2,000 parking spaces? The assembly plant at Boeing's Everett site is 4.3 million square feet and covers over 1,000 acres of floorspace.

I've never worked at Boeing, although the company has been a part in my life since 1979. It seems incredible that in 32 years I've been "inside" Boeing facilities only twice. (It isn't the sort of place where you drop by to have lunch with your husband in the cafeteria.) The first time I passed through "The Gate" was 20 years ago when I was escorted by John to an open house at Boeing Field Flight Test in Seattle. It was a long time ago, but I remember the odd feeling of seeing where John spent so many of his waking hours. And putting faces to the names of people I felt like I already knew, and who seemed to already know me!

And yesterday I went inside Boeing again for a family day event at the Everett site. John doesn't work way up in Everett (thankfully) but 30,000 others do, so throngs of family members showed up with "their" Boeing employee. Boeing Everett does offer a $20 public tour, but this was much, much better. Thousands of us, from little kids to grannies in wheelchairs, gawked around the factory floor, took freight elevators to viewing balconies, and stood in line to buy coffee at one of the two Tully's stores right inside the factory.

The 747 assembly line

I've always known it was there, but I wasn't prepared to be so wowed by just a big building. But you really can't comprehend the scale unless you actually see it. The best views were 3 stories up from the observation balconies, where the giant jetliners were lined up below like little toys in various stages of assembly. In the long process of designing a new airplane, John tells me that putting the pieces together is not the most expensive part, or necessarily the most complicated. But seeing the final process, and the sparkling new airplanes ready to be pushed out the door and fly to every corner of the world-- well, it gave me a lump in my throat.

There were so many overwhelming sights to take in and luckily I had a personal, expert guide to explain things ;-) It's interesting that the traditional method of assembly was to park the planes in stationary, diagonal lines. More recently, Henry Ford's moving assembly line is being used successfully. On some lines, the planes are now lined up nose-to-tail and crawl along at about 1.5 inches per minute. This has cut the assembly time on the 777 from 26 days to 17. Impressive.

787 Dreamliner

I'll leave you with this hopeful image to draw your own conclusions on the future of Boeing. A new shining star on the assembly line, surrounded by hundreds of computer workstations.