Got to tour the Boeing plant in Everett, which was really cool. Man that's a big building. I remember being astounded the first time I set foot in the Bell Labs Holmdel facility thinking how big it was. However, it pales in comparison though to the airplane factory.
I accidentally left the brochure in Washington, but here are some fun stats (from http://www.boeing.com/commercial/facilities/):
- The building is 98.3 acres and 472,000,000 cubic feet, making it the largest building in the world (by volume).
- The building is .78 miles in length, meaning it's longer than my walk to work every morning (0.56 miles)
- You could put Disneyland inside of the building and still have thirteen acres of indoor parking
- The 767's are on an assembly line where the planes move 1.7" per minute. They have big ten foot long boxes painted on the floor that say things like "Day 1 shift 1, 1-4pm", "Day 1 shift 2, 4-8pm" where the plane rolls along.
- Boeing provide 1400 bicycles for the engineers to get around in the building.
- We went througha series of service tunnels under the facility, with ten feet of concrete between the basement and the factory floor.
It's very strange to be 100 feet up in the observation deck, looking down at 747 aircraft that look like the size of matchbox cars. They say you can't take any cameras, cell phones or iPods into the factory out of fear that you will drop them onto someone from the observation deck. Heh. Certainly it wouldn't have anything to do with a fear of industrial espionage.
Update: here it is on Google Maps:
http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&q=47.925389,-122.272078&ie=UTF8&ll=47.925114,-122.271566&spn=0.013286,0.030556&z=15
