What it's like to work in the biggest building in the world

[Admin]

To build a fleet of giant airliners requires a building just as big. Boeing’s Everett Factory, built to construct the famous 747, is the biggest enclosed structure in the world.

 

When you’re building some of the world’s biggest airliners, you need an equally outsized building.

 

When Boeing decided to build the 747 – a plane so big it would become known around the world as the jumbo jet – they had to build a factory large enough to build several of them at the same time.

 

If you’ve ever seen a 747 from close quarters you’ll know just how giant Boeing’s jumbo is. So it’s no surprise the factory which ended up building has to be very big indeed.

 

How big? Try the biggest enclosed building in the world.

 

Boeing started work on the Everett factory in 1967, just as the Boeing 747 project was starting to gather pace. Bill Allen, Boeing’s charismatic chief, had realised the company would need a huge amount of space if they were going to build an airliner big enough to carry 400 passengers. They chose an area of woodland some 22 miles (35km) north of Seattle, near an airport that had served as a fighter base during World War Two.

 

An article in the Daily Herald, Everett’s local paper, recalls just how out of the way the airport was. According to Joe Sutter, the engineer who masterminded the 747 project, the site had only minor road access to the nearest highway and no railway connection. In the forest roamed wild bears.

 

 

The factory now produces the newer generations of Boeing airliners (Credit: Getty Images)

 

At the same time Boeing was building the prototype of the world’s biggest airliner, it was also having to construct the factory to make them in.

 

Today, the Everett factory easily dwarfs any other building in the world by volume, with the Guinness Book of Records reporting that it occupies 72 million cubic feet (13.3 million cubic metres).

 

“We’ve overlaid the building over some of the most famous landmarks around the world,” says David Reese, who helps runs the factory tours at Everett. “We have various famous places like Versailles, the Vatican and Disneyland, and you see them when you start the factory tour.

 

“I remember I did an interview with the BBC a few years ago, and I thought ‘I wonder what the volume of Wembley Stadium is?’ Well, it turns out you can fit 13 of them in the volume of our factory.”

 

The Everett plant still produces a dwindling number of 747 freighters, but today it mostly concentrates on the smaller 767, 777 and 787 models. To build that fleet of planes requires lots of room. Everett’s main building covers 97.8 acres (39 hectares), more than 30 times as big as London’s Trafalgar Square.

 

 

Boeing had to build the new factory at the same time it was designing the 747 (Credit: Boeing)

 

Each shift has as many as 10,000 workers, and there are three shifts each day. Over the course of 24 hours, the factory has a population only a little less than the Australian city of Alice Springs.

 

Reese has worked for Boeing for 38 years – 11 of them running the factory tours – but says he can still remember his first impression of the factory. “It was very awe-inspiring the first time – and I would have to say every day since, too.  It changes constantly. Each day there’s something new.”

 

The Everett factory is so big that there’s a fleet of some 1,300 bicycles on hand to help cut travel time. It has its own fire station and medical services on station, and an array of cafes and restaurants to feed the thousands of workers.  Overhead are a multitude of cranes used to move some of the heavier aircraft parts as the planes start to take shape. The operators, Reese says, are some of the most highly skilled and best-paid workers at the factory.

 

There are a few rules for working in, or even just visiting, the factory. “We do require proper footwear, so no open-toed shoes and no high heels for the ladies – anything that could possibly cause a fall or damage your feet – and you have to wear safety glasses at all times in the factory. Constantly. That can be an issue with some of our visitors, they say things like ‘Oh, I wear reading glasses, that will be enough.’ It’s not.”

 

The factory boasts some surprising features. While there is ventilation, there is no air conditioning. In summer, if it gets too hot, Reese says, they just open the massive doors to let in the breeze. In winter, the effect of the more than one million lights, the huge amount of electric equipment and some 10,000 human bodies also helps moderate the temperatures. “I only have to wear a sweater or a light jacket and that’s sufficient.”

 

There is a longstanding urban myth that the building is so large and high that clouds form at the top of it. Not quite so, says Reese. “The building was still being constructed as the first plane was being built, and one wall was not yet enclosed. We think that fog or mist from the outside and accumulated in the building, and it looked like a kind of hazy atmosphere.

 

 

The finished aircraft are towed over a bridge to a nearby airport (Credit: Boeing)

 

“It’s the same thing when we had wildfires nearby, it got pretty hazy inside the factory.”

 

Reese says the factory’s days have an ebb and flow, the factory changing tasks as the day progresses.  “The second shift, that’s when there’s more crane activity when there isn’t quite as many people.

 

“When we move a finished aircraft out of the factory it’s driven over a freeway to an airport nearby, and in order not to startle the drivers too much, we tend to do that at night.”

 

Not just the world’s biggest building, but full of surprises too.

 

 

[Kyle Communications]

I did the tour in October this year of the factory. It is pretty mind blowing how big that place is. When you arrive on the bus you go down these stairs to a tunnel network underneath...it must be nearly 1 km long I am sure of it and thats not the long side..we walked about 400 mtrs I think to just one of the elevators to take us up to the observation deck..then when you are finished there you walk back and up the stairs then onto the bus and over to the other end on the building about 1.5km away then back down the stairs and into a similar tunnel....if you are ever in Seattle you need to do the tour..its only $25 US but no cameras allowed though which is a bummer. They have to go into lockers outside. Everett is about a 35 min drive north of Seattle.  Then you drive about 15km south of Seattle to the Museum of Flight....that is awesome as well...they have so many great aircraft there...the number 1 test 747...a Blackbird and its piggyback drone a BA Concorde and so much more..another must see when in Seattle. Pictures are just a small taste of whats at the Museum of Flight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jabiru7252]

That's pretty cool. Forty years ago I worked on the tallest office building in Europe (NatWest Tower, London). But that's pretty lame these days.

 

 

[spacesailor]

Originally that Biggie hanger was for the Grand-Zeppelin.

 

spacesailor

 

 

[onetrack]

Most of the Zeppelin hangars were pretty impressive, size-wise - particularly when you consider they were all built in the 1920's. This one in Rio de Janeiro is still in good shape.

 

When you can make a P-3 Orion look like a Cessna inside your hangar, you've got hangar with bragging rights. 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/27/brazil-zeppelin-hangar-nazis#img-3

 

 

[spacesailor]

THANKS.

 

onetrack,

 

Outstanding work, The "Spiders did to make that "KIT-HANGER".

 

It would be nice to see Big Birds of that magnitude in the skies again, like "Bondies Blimps".

 

My Mother watched the R100 fly overhead, & always praised it as spectacular.

 

spacesailor