Aviation geeks tour Boeing factory for 747s, 777s and 787s. - CNN.com

I had to share this story from CNN. I have included enough to whet the appetite and introduce the tours that Boeing puts on. I strongly suggest that you go for a Boeing tour and read the rest of the article over at CNN.COM

Wow! Making planes in the world's biggest building

By Thom Patterson, CNN

updated 10:04 AM EST, Wed February 26, 2014

Boeing offers a public tour of its assembly plant in Everett, Washington. It's the largest building in the world by volume, covering 98.3 acres. About 110,000 visitors tour the factory every year.

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Watching Boeing make giant airliners

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Boeing allowed aviation fans unique factory access during a February convention
• "Avgeeks" toured factories for 737, 747, 777 and 787 Dreamliner
• Growing avgeek community challenges legacy news media

Everett, Washington (CNN) -- Sprawled out before us sits the exterior of the world's biggest building by volume. They make airliners here. Big ones.

"Let's go see some airplanes!" says our Boeing VIP tour guide.

I remind myself: This doesn't happen very often.

Yeah yeah yeah, Boeing offers public tours of this 98.3-acre airliner factory north of Seattle every day. This ain't that. This is special.

As part of a convention of aviation fans called Aviation Geek Fest, we're gaining ultra-exclusive access to the factory FLOOR. The public tour is limited to the balcony. We're about to walk knee-deep where Boeing gives birth to some of the world's biggest and most advanced airliners, including the 747-8 Intercontinental, the 777 Worldliner and the 787 Dreamliner.

Hot damn.

But not so fast -- before we go inside, Boeing has laid down some rules: no photos, no video, for our eyes only.

Here's a painful development: Our smartphones have been confiscated. Gulp. I'm already suffering from phantom phone pangs.

Plane stuck at airport

We enter through a small, inconspicuous door marked S-1. Suddenly, we're surrounded by partly assembled airliners in a room so big it takes on the feeling of an entire world. In some spots, we gaze across an unobstructed view measuring a quarter-mile.

This building is so flippin' big that -- years ago -- it created its own inside weather patterns, including vapor clouds. They eliminated that by installing a special ventilation system. Today's factory forecast: avgeeking, with continued avgeeking and a favorable chance of avgeeking later in the day.

Here are a few cool tidbits........

If you want to read the rest, follow the link below!
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Aviation geeks tour Boeing factory for 747s, 777s and 787s. - CNN.com:



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