J_K9 @ Linux

Day 7: Boeing Tours

March 28, 2007 on 11:06 am | In Seattle 2007 |

The largest building by volume in the world as recorded by the Guinness book of records is one of Boeing’s aircraft production sites, which we visited today. We also visited some of Beoing’s concept centres and learnt more about its upcoming commercial aircraft, the Boeing 787.

Boeing Factory Tour

We left our hotel at 7.30am, as usual, and – unsurprisingly – the cars in which we were travelling lost each other along the journey. However, we both managed to find our way to Boeing’s tourist centre building at Everett and we made it just in time for our tour, scheduled for 9am.

The tour of Boeing’s Everett Plant was incredible. It was not just what we saw that was interesting and amazing, but offering tours of Boeing’s production plants to the general public is something that few other companies do. We were instructed on the general lifecycle of an aircraft as well as gained an overview of the different stages in the manufacture of a Boeing 747 or 777, from its conception through to its final flight, and an insight into how all of the parts are put together during those stages and where they are both constructed and assembled.

The tour lasted approximately an hour, after which we shopped around for souvenirs and looked around the Future of Flight museum. This museum provided previews of some of the features which will be present in the Boeing 787 aircraft line, the first plane of which will be produced and finished sometime in August 2007. We were also able to learn about some new technologies and concepts, such as the reasoning behind making 50% of the Boeing 787 out of a composite material rather than a standard metal. We were also able to create our own planes using a computer-based system tied to the barcode of our tickets (or the barcode of any other product placed under the scanner). I bought a few keyrings, calculators, t-shirts and the like as gifts for my family before we left; nothing too special!

Lunch

For lunch, we drove off to a small area just off one of the main roads near Boeing’s campus and had nothing more nutritious than an American B.L.T. sandwich with a topping of honey mustard sauce.

Concept Centres

Next were the concept centres: this is where we were introduced to some new technologies which might make their way into the aircrafts of the next 10-15 years, as well as other technologies which were more finalised and viable and could be imagined in use in the aircrafts of today. The two centres which we visited were the Payload Concept Center, where all of the interior work and features of a plane with which the user interacts is researched and the Systems Concept Center, where new backends for these systems are proposed and developed.

We saw some truly innovative creations and inventions which could very well be integrated into the aircrafts manufactured over the next few years. The fact that we had five people attending us just goes to show how far these kind employees were willing to go out of their way to welcome a certain group of students to their workplace and to provide us with the best experience and memories possible of pursuing a technological or engineering career at a company such as Boeing.

Boeing 787 Design Gallery

This was the highlight of our day: being given a tour of the Boeing 787 Design Gallery, a place which only the airline managers, businessmen and other customers considering spending $150 million on this new aircraft often visit. It was a great privilege to be given a tour of the conference rooms, video rooms, appliance rooms, livery rooms and of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner customisation software itself, which is accessible in every room in the building. Being able to visit such an important and to a certain extent confidential section of the company was absolutely fantastic (as was visiting Microsoft’s eHome and CIW).

From Boeing’s perspective, the main advantage of having this new building is that customers can select the specifications of their aircraft solely from this site without having to travel around the world to see alternative products for, say, the economy seats because the building is a centralised repository for the majority of the features which a customer could incorporate into their plane.

The Last Supper

We returned to the hotel to freshen up and then went out for supper with a Microsoft employee by the name of Martin Lovell, who had attended our school when he was a teenager. Martin Lovell has had a fairly wide range of jobs over the 11 years he has been at Microsoft, mainly doing software development but also working on implementing new UI features and whatnot (which does itself include software development). He, like the other Microsoft employees which we had met, was very interesting to talk to and he enjoyed answering our questions over supper.

The supper ended with an awards ceremony of sorts in which every student was given a cent coin for being particularly outstanding in a specific area. I won the award for “The Most Attacks on the Host Company” I think that is more an (mis)interpretation of my actions rather than what I was actually setting out to do – to clarify uncertain situations – but we all took our rewards in good spirit and enjoyed the rest of our supper.

I have really enjoyed my stay (or vacation ) in the US and specifically the talks I have had at Microsoft and Boeing. I really appreciate all that has been done for me and my peers, especially all the time which has been given up by the employees – and by Josh Edwards in particular – to welcome us and share their workplace culture with us , and I hope to see the people we have met again in the near future!