Boeing factory

A Visit to the Boeing Factory

If you have even a little plane-geek gene in you, this is a must-see. During our visit to Seattle, I finally had the opportunity to visit the Boeing factory in Everett. The experience begins at the Future of Flight Aviation Center, which is fascinating in its own right, but for me the real highlight was going behind the scenes and entering the enormous Boeing production complex.

And enormous really is the word.

The tour takes you inside, above and alongside the assembly halls where generations of Boeing wide-body aircraft have been built. Standing high above the production floor and looking down on aircraft in various stages of construction gives you an entirely different appreciation of their scale. Wings, fuselage sections, engines and countless components gradually come together until, eventually, another complete aircraft is ready to leave the factory. It is quite something to realise that so many of the aircraft we have travelled in around the world began their lives right here.

The Everett factory was originally built in the 1960s for the production of the revolutionary Boeing 747. Boeing had received an order from Pan American World Airways for 25 of the new jumbo jets, requiring an assembly facility on an unprecedented scale. The first 747 rolled out in 1968, beginning an extraordinary chapter in aviation history. In later decades, the factory also became associated with other major Boeing aircraft families, including the 767, 777 and 787 Dreamliner.

For someone who had dreamed of flying since childhood, walking through a place where some of the world’s great passenger aircraft were created was much more than just another factory tour.

I may never have become a pilot, but for a few hours in Everett I was about
as close to the heart of aviation as I could possibly get.