Boeing Factory Tour
[In keeping with my previous vow to give up on strict chronological blogging, I'm not going to mention a very pleasant evening spent with my old college buddy in Seattle and his new (to me) wife and new child. Oh, wait...]
I disavow all responsibility for the Boeing Factory Tour. I'm here to say -- I didn't discover that it was offered, I didn't suggest that we go on it, I didn't buy the tickets a couple days in advance. It was all M., and I swear I had nothing to do with it.
I was kind of surprised by her enthusiasm, but I sure wasn't going to complain! Boeing has a nice little Museum of Flight, with a few bits and pieces of aircraft, and models of a bunch of airliners (even non-Boeing airliners) telling the history of commercial flight. There's even a fun little 727 cockpit. It was stuffed with excited kids, but I still got a chance to flick a few switches and marvel at the complexity of even an ancient plane like that when compared to the few little switches and breakers in the little Piper Cherokee that I fly.
The museum is fun, but not that remarkable. Getting a chance to see them putting together 747s and 737s and 787s (the new Dreamliner), though, was pretty darn exciting. I've been to countless places (mostly NASA) that claim to have the largest building in the world, but I'm inclined to believe Boeing. Their plant clearly dwarfed the gigantic 747s that were being assembled, and wandering around in the tunnels and riding the freight elevators was a blast.
It was pretty wild to see complex wing jigs that towered 50 feet above the floor, reminding me of my youthful attempts to build balsa-wood models. Pwhew! Doing it full-scale looks rather harder.
It was wild seeing the Dreamliner assembly line, since Boeing had just announced the day before that the first flight of the aircraft would be postponed by at least a couple months. They had two of the planes built and sitting on the tarmac, and it seemed like there were three of them nearly finished, and a whole bunch more that were coming along. Yow. Hopefully, they can fix their wing-attachment problem in those finished aircraft.
Just about every spot on the factory floor that wasn't taken up with airplane parts was taken up with cubicles for the hundreds of engineers working on the plane. We got to watch a shift change, complete with hotdesking, as engineers left and new engineers came over to take over. I had no idea that it took that much computing power to build a new aircraft, but I presume that there's a fair amount of process involved in putting together a $300 million aircraft that you'd like to last for 50 years.
There was plenty of the corporate cheerleading that you'd expect, but, all in all, it was a pretty fabulous experience!
I disavow all responsibility for the Boeing Factory Tour. I'm here to say -- I didn't discover that it was offered, I didn't suggest that we go on it, I didn't buy the tickets a couple days in advance. It was all M., and I swear I had nothing to do with it.
I was kind of surprised by her enthusiasm, but I sure wasn't going to complain! Boeing has a nice little Museum of Flight, with a few bits and pieces of aircraft, and models of a bunch of airliners (even non-Boeing airliners) telling the history of commercial flight. There's even a fun little 727 cockpit. It was stuffed with excited kids, but I still got a chance to flick a few switches and marvel at the complexity of even an ancient plane like that when compared to the few little switches and breakers in the little Piper Cherokee that I fly.
The museum is fun, but not that remarkable. Getting a chance to see them putting together 747s and 737s and 787s (the new Dreamliner), though, was pretty darn exciting. I've been to countless places (mostly NASA) that claim to have the largest building in the world, but I'm inclined to believe Boeing. Their plant clearly dwarfed the gigantic 747s that were being assembled, and wandering around in the tunnels and riding the freight elevators was a blast.
It was pretty wild to see complex wing jigs that towered 50 feet above the floor, reminding me of my youthful attempts to build balsa-wood models. Pwhew! Doing it full-scale looks rather harder.
It was wild seeing the Dreamliner assembly line, since Boeing had just announced the day before that the first flight of the aircraft would be postponed by at least a couple months. They had two of the planes built and sitting on the tarmac, and it seemed like there were three of them nearly finished, and a whole bunch more that were coming along. Yow. Hopefully, they can fix their wing-attachment problem in those finished aircraft.
Just about every spot on the factory floor that wasn't taken up with airplane parts was taken up with cubicles for the hundreds of engineers working on the plane. We got to watch a shift change, complete with hotdesking, as engineers left and new engineers came over to take over. I had no idea that it took that much computing power to build a new aircraft, but I presume that there's a fair amount of process involved in putting together a $300 million aircraft that you'd like to last for 50 years.
There was plenty of the corporate cheerleading that you'd expect, but, all in all, it was a pretty fabulous experience!
posted by K at
11:49 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home