timblesworldtour

I can be quite a saddo, when it comes to aircraft. As a consequence, it was anonimously decided we would visit the Boeing factory at Everett, just North of Seattle, where there is a visitor centre, and the opportunity to visit the 747,767 and new 787 production lines.

Anyway, we booked some tickets, and drove up the 30 or so miles, and were pretty impressed on first arrival, as the visitor centre is located just across the road from the factory (which is so huge, it is in the guinness book of records). The visitor centre (‘experience’) is custom built, called ‘The Future of Flight, and has a cafe (pretty appalling food) two giftshops, and an exhibition hall. We went into the exhibition hall, which is pretty well laid out, and has lots of ‘hands-on’ types of exhibits. Much of these give you an idea of the scale of the aircraft, such as with this picture of the tail fin for a Boeing 747.

There are also many interesting display boards, and you even get an opportunity to design your own jet, although the simplicity of this means it’s really for 4 year olds.

Anyway, the best bit is the actual factory tour. Or so we thought.

Anyway, at the start they take you into a theatre, where we are all told around ten times, that there are no restrooms on the tour. We are then shown two films. These must be the cheapest, oldest, crappiest, shitty quality corporate videos I have seen. For a world leader in technology, they are truly awful. The first just consists of a music track with lots of historical montage type images, and is truly just crap. I could do better with a copy of Adobe After Effects and an HDV recorder in about a day. I do hope Boeing didn’t pay to get this film made.

The second movie was a promo (with no info whatsoever) on the new 787 ‘Dreamliner Boeing will launch later this year. In fact pretty much the only piece of info in the whole tour was that Boeing were launching a new plane. After these two awful movies (and with no further explanation) we boarded a bus. This took us from the visitor centre across to the factory. During this Journey, the tour guide told us some usuefl info about the factory, Paine Field, and the types of aircraft assembled at this site.

Upon leaving the bus, we entered an underground service corridor on foot, and took a large lift to the fourth floor, where we all assembled on a viewing balcony, which kind of straddled the middle of the factory. We were told to look over on side, and were shown some of the aircraft in production, with some general production info, then we looked over the other side to see an empty hanger, which we were told was to be the site of production for the new airliner (which clearly everyone in Boeing is overly enthused about). We then got in the lift to go down some levels, and ….got back on the bus, and back to the visitor centre. Yip, that is the Boeing tour, a look over two sides of a balcony, and some general info. Almost without exception, everyone in our group thought we were going to another level for more info and to see more of the factory, when we got back in the lift. Instead, we discovered that the tour was over. Well, whoopee-do! Well done Boeing for producing the most useless production tour in the world. Words fail me to describe my (and others) sense of being cheated by Boeing.