What it's Like To Work in the Biggest Building in the World (bbc.com) 70
To build a fleet of giant airliners requires a building just as big. Boeing's Everett Factory, built to construct the famous 747, is the biggest enclosed structure in the world. BBC Future: When you're building some of the world's biggest airliners, you need an equally outsized building. When Boeing decided to build the 747 -- a plane so big it would become known around the world as the jumbo jet -- they had to build a factory large enough to build several of them at the same time. If you've ever seen a 747 from close quarters you'll know just how giant Boeing's jumbo is. So it's no surprise the factory which ended up building has to be very big indeed. How big? Try the biggest enclosed building in the world.
Boeing started work on the Everett factory in 1967, just as the Boeing 747 project was starting to gather pace. Bill Allen, Boeing's charismatic chief, had realised the company would need a huge amount of space if they were going to build an airliner big enough to carry 400 passengers. They chose an area of woodland some 22 miles (35km) north of Seattle, near an airport that had served as a fighter base during World War Two. [...] Today, the Everett factory easily dwarfs any other building in the world by volume, with the Guinness Book of Records reporting that it occupies 72 million cubic feet (13.3 million cubic metres).
[...] Each shift has as many as 10,000 workers, and there are three shifts each day. Over the course of 24 hours, the factory has a population only a little less than the Australian city of Alice Springs. Reese has worked for Boeing for 38 years -- 11 of them running the factory tours -- but says he can still remember his first impression of the factory. "It was very awe-inspiring the first time -- and I would have to say every day since, too. It changes constantly. Each day there's something new." The Everett factory is so big that there's a fleet of some 1,300 bicycles on hand to help cut travel time. It has its own fire station and medical services on station, and an array of cafes and restaurants to feed the thousands of workers.
Boeing started work on the Everett factory in 1967, just as the Boeing 747 project was starting to gather pace. Bill Allen, Boeing's charismatic chief, had realised the company would need a huge amount of space if they were going to build an airliner big enough to carry 400 passengers. They chose an area of woodland some 22 miles (35km) north of Seattle, near an airport that had served as a fighter base during World War Two. [...] Today, the Everett factory easily dwarfs any other building in the world by volume, with the Guinness Book of Records reporting that it occupies 72 million cubic feet (13.3 million cubic metres).
[...] Each shift has as many as 10,000 workers, and there are three shifts each day. Over the course of 24 hours, the factory has a population only a little less than the Australian city of Alice Springs. Reese has worked for Boeing for 38 years -- 11 of them running the factory tours -- but says he can still remember his first impression of the factory. "It was very awe-inspiring the first time -- and I would have to say every day since, too. It changes constantly. Each day there's something new." The Everett factory is so big that there's a fleet of some 1,300 bicycles on hand to help cut travel time. It has its own fire station and medical services on station, and an array of cafes and restaurants to feed the thousands of workers.
Typical Editing (Score:5, Interesting)
An summary pointing to an article about the biggest building in the world, that doesn't contain any information about how large the building actually is. Nice job, Slashdot.
Spoiler from TFA: it occupies 72 million cubic feet (13.3 million cubic metres).
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I just worked on a new hangar for a major airline which was sized to work on a couple of wide body jets or three narrow bodies (not even a jumbo jet) and I calculate it to be around 20,000,000 cubic feet, give or take. The new hangar is connected to an old hangar of similar size, which technically makes the combined two hangars a sing
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You're right. It's ~472,000,000 cubic feet.
Cubic units are always misleading for how "small" they are.
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A video is worth 1000 words ...
Boeing Everett Factory - National Geographic [youtube.com]
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I did a tour once, it was pretty big. They told us that they had to fix the building because it had it's own weather system and would rain inside sometimes in the afternoon.
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*Looks at 72 million cubic feet workshop*
I need a new workshop. *Starting working on business case to convince wife*
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Spoiler from TFA: it occupies 72 million cubic feet (13.3 million cubic metres).
72 million cubic feet = 2 million cubic meters.
According to Wikipedia, it is 472 million cubic feet = 13.3 million cubic meters.
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News? (Score:2)
However,...
How is a description of a 50-year old factory, which doesn't actually make the 747 anymore, qualify as news?
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The scale of the manufacturing is indeed awesome, ...
Tell me about it.
One thing I heard about at the time (so I don't know for SURE if it was true, having just rumor, not personal experience or documentation) was the incremental plotter capable of making full-sized engineering drawings - of the entire plane. (Wow!)
Allegedly this consisted of a "plotter bed" the size of a hanger floor, with embedded wires to serve as the "windings" of a two-dimensional stepper motor. (I think the paper was held down by a
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Note that "stepper" motors don't HAVE to move in increments of the pole spacing (though many have pole pieces shaped to encourage this.) If the pole pieces are properly shaped, they can also be operated as a polyphase analog motor and driven to positions arbitrarily dividing the cycle. Then the electronics can provide "steps" substantially finer than the pole spacing (or even "pure analog" positioning). At displacem
What about this bridge? (Score:1)
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Good journalism (Score:2)
Listing 72 million cubic feet without some other big famous building to compare it to - I can't visualize 72 million cubic feet...
Also it looks like the author just googled city populations around 25000 and picked the nearest one, I had never heard of April Springs...
Ok, maybe I am just dumb - but good journalism uses comparisons even us dummies can understand. The art of good journalism writing is dead.
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I think we can all agree that we're not looking at a work of journalism here. It's fluff. Nobody checked anything. The conversion from cubic feet to cubic meters is quite off: 72 million cubic feet is not 13.3 million cubic meters. It's just 2 million cubic meters. Then the article quotes a tour guide explaining that you could fit 13 Wembley Stadiums in the volume of the factory. Guess what, you can't. The bowl volume of Wembley Stadium is 1139100 cubic meters. It wouldn't even fit twice. With journalists n
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Good point. Can someone smart please say how many Costcos this would be? Or football fields?
Costcos aren't all the same size. (Football fields would work, if you're neglecting the stands and the space between the field proper and the audience..)
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Even just giving the dimensions would be helpful. How god damn hard is that to figure out? Here is their fact sheet [boeing.com], which is a ton more helpful than the negative value the author added to this piece.
114 feet tall by 1614 feet wide by 3500 feet long. In convenient units, that's about ten stories tall, and a third of a mile wide by two thirds of a mile long. That I can picture. And it's fucking huge.
But why is this on /. again?
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Talk about a good mix of useful and useless measurements:
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Listing 72 million cubic feet without some other big famous building to compare it to - I can't visualize 72 million cubic feet...
First, it is NOT 72 million cubic feet. It is 472 million cubic feet. The author of TFA apparently mismoused the 4 during the cut-and-paste operation.
The Library of Congress has 2,100,000 square feet. If we assume a floor-to-floor distance of 10 feet, that would be 21 million cubic feet.
So this factory is the size of 472/21 = 22.5 LoC.
I had never heard of April Springs...
It is 'Alice', not 'April'. Alice Springs is famous mostly for being located precisely in the middle of nowhere.
Alice Springs, Australia [wikipedia.org]
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I'll use the Library of Congress unit method.
The James Madison Memorial Building (only 1 of 3 buildings comprising the Library, but the largest) has about 17.4 million cubic feet of internal space (87 ft tall, 400 wide, 500 deep).
So 72 million cubic feet is about 4.14 Library's of Congress.
April Springs is not a unit of measure I am not familiar with.
James Madison building dimensions:
https://www.emporis.com/buildi... [emporis.com]
Only by volume (Score:5, Informative)
By footprint, the flower auction in Aalsmeer is quite a bit larger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aalsmeer_Flower_Auction)
I worked there for a while, many years ago. We got around on bicycles; customers on the far end of the building were half an hour from our office (which lay on one of the corners). There were very few signs around the building, so you had to know where you were going. Having said that, various areas had a different feel to them - in that sense it was like a city. Travelling by bike was fairly dangerous, as you shared the 'roads' with the electrical 'trains' that carry the flowers to and from.
Work starts at six in the morning, and finishes at around two in the afternoon. There is a visitor gallery, running above the floor where the actual work happens. It's worth a visit - but do come in the morning, as it is mostly deserted in the afternoon.
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Answering my own question.
https://new.abb.com/low-voltage/products/building-automation/service-and-tools/references/airbus-a380-final-assembly-hall
says 31,000m^2 floor space with a ceiling height of 24m; 744,000m^3
BBC metric conversion fail (Score:2)
It can't be both 72 million cu.ft and 13.3 million cu.m. A foot is 0.3048 meters so a cubic meter is over 31.3 cubic feet. No idea how someone would come up with a cubic meter being 5.4 cubic feet.
13.3 million cubic meters is correct; that's 470 million cubic feet.
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This is Boeing. The original volume figures are probably in hogsheads.
Used to work there (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of nice hiding places.
I actually worked in a nearby engineering building, but our techs had shop space in the main factory building. So I'd walk through the plant and watch the planes being built. A lot more interesting than the public tour.
When I visited our shop, I'd take one of a few shortcuts through what is a rabbit warren of passages, offices, store rooms, etc. One area consisted of a bunch of lunch tables with people sitting around, reading the paper or playing cards. When I'd walk through, most of the time, I'd dress casually. So I blended in with the factory work force. But occasionally, I'd wear a suit. And I'd go walking through this area. Immediately, a guy that (I assume) was the group supervisor ran out and asked if he could help me. With a pretty frightened look on his face. So I asked our techs what was up with these people. It seems that their boss had managed to carve himself out a 'do nothing' task and assemble a group of his buddies. Who spent their day just reading the paper and playing cards. But they are buried so deeply in the factory building that nobody would find them. Except for some guy who looked like he was from corporate, wandering around asking questions.
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I think every big company has at least one group like that, that has a "do nothing" task.
At SimDesk, a now-defunct tech company, they called that department "R&D". If somebody got moved to R&D, you knew they couldn't quite cut it, but they didn't want to fire them. R&D didn't actually do any research or development, they just messed around.
Many companies just call this department "the executive suite."
It's actually kind of nice in there (Score:2)
Just went on a tour there and enjoyed it, liked the cafe inside and the nearby shop display building, saw quite a few of the new planes being built, including those not yet assembled. Nicer than the place we used to design drones in.
Tesla GF1 has a bigger foot print (Score:2)
The Space Shuttle assembly building is the world's tallest enclosed space. It rains inside the building. Boeing Everette also rains inside I heard. not sure if its true.
At the end of the work day (Score:2)