Friday was all about large buildings and planes; on Friday morning, I drove the family to Everett to visit Boeing’s Future of Flight facilities, which is located in the largest building in the world, by volume, at 472,000,000 cubic feet. It’s the only public tour of a commercial jet assembly plant in North America, and it is, in a word, awesome. It’s a little difficult to wrap my brain around the fact that just this plant alone employs over twenty-seven THOUSAND people, even when you’re looking at the scale of this building, even when you can see an assembly line of full-size planes inside. This building is so large that Boeing keeps over 1,300 bicycles on the factory floor for employees to get around. This building is so large that it has its own fire department, hospital, water treatment plant, electrical substations, and FOUR telephone prefixes. This building is so large that it created its own weather–warm air and moisture accumulated near the ceiling, forming clouds. That is a one DAMN BIG BUILDING. Boeing has a moving assembly line, though it moves too slowly for the naked eye to discern. A plane moves through this assembly line from start to finish in about four months, so if I were to visit again three months from now, the model 777 number 666 (devil plane! devil plane!) that was in its earliest stages of construction on Friday would nearly be ready to roll off the line. We also got to see the very first 787 Dreamliner, which is awesome beyond belief. My friend Banjo works for Boeing, and she was telling me how incredible this plane was when it was still a hush-hush secret; now that I’ve actually seen and touched one, I am convinced it will change the way we fly, because, of course, my opinion about these sorts of things matters. First off, it’s constructed of nearly 50% composite materials, which makes it about 40,000 pounds lighter than airplanes constructed of conventional materials–this makes it much more fuel efficient, so…yay environment! Equally as important to passengers is the fact that the composites are stronger, which enables it to have much larger windows and a cabin pressure of lower altitude, which increases comfort/reduces jetlag.

    They’ve also increased the size of the cabin, which is an incredible boon for claustrophobics. Seriously. That picture makes me excited to fly again, and I have been a VERY surly flyer lately, angrily defending my personal space bubble. I fit within the confines of my seat, and I expect that anyone sitting next to me does the same. If I wanted to be touched by strangers, I’d go to Neighbors. Last but not least, I designed my own super-sweet airplane. Come fly the Mellzah skies!

After we left the Boeing plant, we went back to Seattle where the ever-lovely Carrie escorted us to the viewing deck of the Columbia Center building, which was at one point the tallest building west of the Mississippi. As we got to the top, it turned out our timing was perfect as the Blue Angels were just starting their show over Lake Washington, which my grandparents were very, very excited about.

I only ended up getting one picture, as a certain roommate was using my camera to take pictures of herself for her Internet Boyfriend, and failed to tell me that she’d killed the (proprietary) battery. And lo, there was much gnashing of teeth. Still, even from this one picture you can get a decent idea of just how much this jet black building looms over everything else. Afterward, keeping to the trend of going somewhere and immediately turning around and going back, I took everyone to Pike Place Market, finally found/paid for a parking spot, the grandparents took a quick peek and were ready to go back. GAH.