![Boeing factory in Everett, Washington [Credit: Boeing Future of Flight]](https://flyingmag1.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/FLY0126_2.1-Boeing-Factory-B.jpeg?width=1973&height=1215)
What does the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, have in common with the Pyramids of Giza and Vatican City? They are all known for their size, and visiting them is on the bucket list of a great many people.
For pilots and aviation enthusiasts, a tour of the Boeing factory, the largest airplane manufacturing plant in the world is a must-do. According to the aerospace giant, over 150,000 people come each year for a tour
The Boeing Future of Flight opened in 2005 and is a company-centric facility that is part-museum, part-gallery, part-store, in addition to being a working factory that rolls out freighters and passenger jets destined for airlines in all corners of the world. The center sits adjacent to Seattle Paine Field International Airport (KPAE) in Mukilteo, Washington, approximately 22 miles north of Seattle—and right across the freeway from the massive factory.
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If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be the person who plays a role in building the bigger aircraft, the
Boeing factory tour is for you.
Rules of Engagement
Because this is a working factory, there are strict rules for the tour. For starters, anything that could accidentally be dropped is not permitted to be carried. This includes purses, backpacks, cameras, phones and tablets, pencils, pens, notepads or binoculars. The building you are touring is 12 stories tall, and you’re up several stories above the factory floor, so accidentally dropping an item could be very bad.
Children are permitted on the tour with certain limitations—again for safety reasons. They must be at least 4-foot tall, and the carrying of children is not permitted. Youths under 16 must be accompanied by an adult. Other common-sense rules include no food or drinks, smoking, vaping, and weapons of any kind.
Complimentary lockers are available for use in the lobby for the duration of the tour. The lockers have digital codes that you can personalize. It took a few minutes to divest myself of forbidden items and then I experienced a Breakfast Club moment stuffing my aviation backpack into the locker.
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My tour was made possible by Brandon Black, marketing communications for Boeing brand experience. Black met me in the lobby, where there’s a giant compass rose superimposed with an aerial view of KPAE, so you see the full perspective of how large the Boeing building is in comparison with the structure of the airport.
Black then took me to the Sky Deck, a 9,000-square-foot observation platform that provides a panoramic view of Paine Field, the Boeing Everett factory, and the North Cascades mountain range. Or it would have had the fog not been so thick.
As we stood on the deck, we heard a jet on approach to Runway 34. According to FlightAware, it was an Airbus A320.
We could barely make out the “piano keys” of the approach end of the runway through the fog, and the jet noise grew louder, then the landing gear and the rest of the airplane appeared as shadow, then substance, touching down before us. Black said the platform is a very popular place to spend lunch breaks and watch airplanes, including the test flights of Boeing’s newest aircraft.
Some Background First
Boeing has done a good job of telling you what to expect physically on the tour. It warns that there are no restrooms for use at the factory during the 90-minute tour, so make a strategic stop before your group departs.
The tour began in a theater with a greeting from Greg Coe, whose official title is Boeing Future of Flight visitor relations specialist and Boeing Everett factory tour guide. Coe’s background is in public radio and as a tour guide around the Pacific Northwest. He credits his knowledge of Boeing to osmosis as he grew up in a suburb that was almost half Boeing employees. He’s been on the job since 2011.
Coe warmed up the crowd by asking where the visitors were from. People come from all over the globe to visit the factory, which is the largest building in the world by volume.
Gazing at the tail of a Boeing 747 on its own gives you an idea of just how gigantic the entire airplane really is.
A mock-up of the Destiny lab module from the International Space Station provides an out-of-this-world experience.
A replica of the next generation of personal aircraft, the Wisk Aero Cora, attracts plenty of attention.
During World War II, ‘Rosie the Riveters’ were formidable on the factory floor, paving the way for women in aviation. [Credit: All photos by Meg Godlewski]
My group included visitors from Ireland, Scotland, India, and the U.S. outside of Washington state. This was followed by a short video about the history of the Boeing Company. It’s important because it really gives perspective to how fast the technology of flight has evolved since that day at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.
William Boeing was educated at Yale University and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1903 to run the Greenwood Timber Company. While in Seattle, he attended the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific-Exposition, where he flew an airplane for the first time. This led to flying lessons, and in 1916, the design of his first aircraft, a wood-and-fabric, open-cockpit biplane, the B&W Seaplane. It was designed with the help of a friend, U.S. Navy Commander George Westervelt. The Pacific Airplane Company was opened in 1916 and renamed the Boeing Company in 1917.
Boeing did more than create designs—he also demonstrated the practical use of airplanes. In 1919 Boeing partnered with Eddie Hubbard to fly a Boeing C-700 seaplane, carrying a bag of some 60 letters from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Lake Union in Seattle in making the first international airmail delivery.
The 1930s saw Boeing transitioning from wood-and-fabric aircraft to metal as he developed military trainers and pursuit aircraft (fighters) along with the iconic Boeing B-17, B-29, and B-47, the stratojet bomber. The segue into commercial jet transport aircraft began in 1957 with the Boeing 707.
In 1967 Boeing came up with the 747. The twin-aisle design was created to meet the needs of Pan Am airlines. The 747 measures 225 feet long with a tail 63 feet tall. For perspective, that’s as tall as a six-story building. The bigger airplane required a bigger building than Boeing had, so work began on the Everett plant.
The building is at the north end of Paine Field. According to historians, the dirt moved to create the facility was equal to the amount in the excavation of the Panama Canal.
The first group of employees—known as “The Incredibles”—assembled the first 747-100 while the factory was being built. The factory officially opened in 1968.
As the demand for the 747, also known as the “Queen of the Skies,” grew and additional designs, specifically the 767, 777, and 787 jumped from the drawing board to the factory floor, the need for space again increased. Today the building is the largest in the world by volume at over 472 million cubic feet, sitting on 98.2 acres. By comparison, Disneyland in Anaheim, California, occupies 85 acres.
The Tour Begins
To get from the Future of Flight center to the factory you take a short bus ride around the north end of the airport via State Route 526, also known as the Boeing Freeway. The complete Boeing campus covers 1,000 acres and spans both sides of the freeway, providing the room for aircraft fabrication, production, product development, safety and security and aircraft certifications, paint hangars, flight line, and delivery center.
The route takes you across a small bridge that serves as an overpass. The pedestrian handrails on the bridge are bright yellow and removable because airliners are towed across this bridge when they are completed. The aircraft are guided by a team of wing walkers and tug drivers during the process.
More than 30,000 people work at the Boeing Everett factory, which operates seven days a week, three shifts per day. The site has facilities for employees to handle the mundane errands of daily life such as banking, dry cleaning, and medical appointments—and there’s even a florist shop. There’s also a day care facility, fitness center, 10 cafes, and seven coffee shops, as well as a fire department and water treatment plant.
Other buildings on the campus include the painting facility, and on the ramp there were aircraft in various stages of completion, most wearing a coat of zinc chromate primer—that green stuff. The coating protects the base metal from corrosion. It’s washed off before the livery paint is applied.
Not every aircraft component is made at the factory, and it takes thousands of parts to create an airplane. Coe compares the manufacturing process to working with Lego bricks, where you have thousands of smaller parts that go together to build larger components (like a wing or fuselage), and eventually the larger parts are assembled resulting in a finished aircraft.
The components usually arrive by rail. They are organized on the ramp by product type, and they come from all over the world. You can tell what came from Australia because the boxes sport the image of a kangaroo.
As you drive by the exterior of the building past the rows and rows of employee parking, it strikes you how large of a structure it is. The doors are larger than a football field , and it takes a full five minutes for a door to be fully opened.
Entering the building requires a climb down 22 stairs to a utility tunnel that puts you beneath the behemoth building. According to Boeing, the factory is so large that it could fit 75 football fields inside.
The tour groups sometimes pass each other here heading opposite directions. You are instructed to stay to the right. The tour guides keep a vigilant count on their charges to make sure no one is lost.
A short elevator ride takes you to the visitor balcony on the fourth floor of the facility, which because of the building construction puts you roughly 60 feet over the factory floor. If you’re vertically challenged, Boeing has thoughtfully provided clear plexiglass side panels, so you can still see the factory floor below.
It’s an awe-inspiring view.
From this vantage point, the vastness of the factory really strikes you. When you think of how large the fuselage of the Boeings are, and how much space the airplane with the wings attached takes up, the employees look like insects moving around the aircraft doing their part to put the massive machines together. The building is so large that employees sometimes use adult-sized tricycles to get around.
There is an urban myth that the building generates its own weather, but this is false, according to Black.
“The factory does not have climate controls,” he said. “Instead, in winter, machinery, body heat, and residual heat from lights keep it warm. In summer, the doors are opened to cool the building. The roof is vented.”
Experimental Lean Engineering
Boeing Commercial Airplanes uses the lean manufacturing process adopted from Japanese auto manufacturer Toyota.
“The 777 ‘pulse’ assembly line is a great example of lean manufacturing, which we use across Boeing Commercial Airplanes,” Coe said. “Lean manufacturing focuses on reducing waste by striving for continuous process improvement. It’s a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste through Boeing lean tactics and tools. This advanced system of mobile structures and processes enhances worker safety, efficiency, and flow time,
improves our processes, proactively solves potential issues, and ensures first-time quality.”
There are moveable work platforms that from the balcony look like a Matchbox playset. Inside these you’ll find the components necessary for aircraft construction—all carefully organized in carts.
Visitors take in the views from the Sky Deck, a 9,000-square-foot observation platform at the Boeing factory. [Credit: Meg Godlewski]
“When the employees arrive, specific jobs have been identified and defined, all the required parts and tools for that assignment are on nearby carts, which is called ‘kitting,’” Coe said. “The carts below are organized in long rows of feeder lines, also called swim lanes [the lines usually reflect the types of jobs—wiring, ventilation, etc.] Each cart uses at-a-glance visual cues to tell the status of what they carry.”
A series of overhead cranes suspended along roof trusses move the larger parts, such as fuselages. To get from one part of the factory to another quickly, there is a network of pedestrian and utility tunnels under the factory floor for safer, quicker movement.
More Than Airplanes
The fun doesn’t end after the tour, as there is still much to see at the Future of Flight center. The Boeing store beckons, and you’ll find models, STEM toys, and branded apparel and luggage in designs of both modern and vintage Boeing aircraft.
The next stop is the gallery. Boeing’s Legacy of Innovation exhibit is showcased here. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be in space, walk through the mock-up of the U.S. Laboratory Destiny module.
You can trace the legacy of the Boeing 747 and see the next generation of aircraft in the form of sustainable, urban transportation with Wisk Aero.
“[It’s] the only place in the Pacific Northwest where you can see this revolutionary autonomous air vehicle,” according to Boeing.
Visitors can also learn more about Boeing’s future efforts, including sustainable fuels, space and hypersonic travel, and autonomous aerial systems.
There is also a nod to the past, with an exhibit honoring the women who built aircraft during World War II—the iconic “Rosie the Riveter.” The display does a nice job of showing the pathway from hands-on construction to the development of engineering challenges and problem solving that make air and space travel possible.
For the younger visitors on tour there are hands-on activities like drawing at light tables, interactive games about powering spacecraft, and pretend play in the Lettuce Lab simulating plant growth in space.
Even if you’re not a fan of flying as a means of transportation, you have to appreciate the amount of teamwork it takes to get the airplanes into the sky.
“I would like visitors to take home from the tour experience an appreciation for the herculean effort needed to make modern air travel a reality,” said Black. “Particularly the men and women at Boeing representing diverse skill sets and occupational fields coming together as one team with a shared mission and purpose whose collective efforts ultimately connect us to our world.”
One of the most frequently asked questions on the tour is how many jets have rolled out of the factory since it was opened.
“Teammates at the Boeing Everett site have built and delivered more than 4,600 widebody airplanes since the plant opened in the mid-1960s,” Black said.
That’s a lot of airplanes capable of moving a lot of people.
This feature first appeared in the January Issue 966 of the FLYING print edition.
