How big is the Boeing Everett plant? It’s big. Very big. (It’s also big on energy and technology, we’ll get to that in a minute…)

You could fit the Pentagon inside the Boeing Everett plant. It’s the world’s largest building, by volume. There are literally miles of utility tunnels underneath a concrete floor that averages 6-8 feet thick.

The Everett plant is so big that it makes its own weather inside. That is, the heat of the lights and machinery alters the climate inside the vast plant. So Boeing uses fans to push the warm air down to heat the plant floor.

The Everett plant floor space is equal to about 75 regulation football fields. You could put all of Disneyland inside the hangar with about 12 acres left over for parking.

Here is a giant plant where literally millions of things all come together to build some of the most complex machines in the world. This surely says something about the scale of effort involved in doing complex things, whether it’s building large aircraft or energy systems.

When you are building something big and complex, scale matters. Size matters. It takes a lot of skilled people to do things. It takes a lot of organization. It takes a system of systems to manufacture parts and get them to the right place at the right time. And it takes a lot of work, spread out over a lot of ground.

The New Boeing 747-8

At Everett, Boeing assembles the B-747-8. This big bird is the latest version of the venerable old jumbo jet 747 workhorse first introduced in 1968.

Boeing’s new version of the 747 has been greatly redesigned to bring it up to the most modern specifications for world aviation. The 747-8 will come out in versions to carry passengers (as well as a VIP version). But the early airplanes are intended mainly as cargo jets, in a world where some of the highest of high-value cargoes travel by airplane. Why not go in style, right?

The 747-8 begins as a set of wings. The wings hold large amounts of fuel, but the aircraft also requires a set of center fuel tanks. So the Boeing builders attach the wings and center fuel tanks and seal the whole system together. Once the “flying fuel tank” is fitted together, the Boeing people assemble the fuselage around the wing box and tanks.

Along the way, as the aircraft progresses through assembly, workers install the landing gear. Toward the end of the assembly process, they hang the engines onto those big wings.

A B-747-8 contains about 6 million discrete parts. About half the parts are “fasteners,” like rivets and screws. So everybody has to know exactly where everything goes and put it all in the right place. And if you think that building a 747-8 is complicated, then try building it on a moving assembly line.

Boeing 777

Speaking of that, Boeing also builds the B-777 at Everett. The 777 comes together on a moving assembly line, if you can believe that a line that large can move. The 777 has taken over much of the long-range passenger business in the world, so it has a lot of customers. To meet demand for the 777, Boeing pulled additional efficiencies out of a moving production line.

The assembly process is similar to the process for the 747-8. First, there are wings. Then mate the fuel tanks. Then they add on the center section, plus the front and back parts of the fuselage. At the right stage, they install landing gear, internal systems and engines.

The greenish tint in the photo is due to a type of plastic wrap that goes onto the bare aluminum skin to protect against corrosion or scratching during assembly. This gets removed at the paint shop after the airplane rolls out.

B-787 Dreamliner

I was able to see three of the new Dreamliners, the B-787s, on the line. They were in varying stages of assembly. The most complete version was the one rolled out on July 8, 2007 (on 7-8-7, get it?), at the Boeing facility. This is the first flight article, due for airborne testing starting December 2008.

The 787 is not your father’s Boeing. This new plane uses a large amount of composite materials. The 787 weighs 40,000 pounds less than a comparable aircraft made of aluminum.

I was able to lay my hands on a sample of the 787 composite skin. It’s very hard, like plastic, but it’s orders of magnitude stronger. The 787 composite material is a woven carbon-carbon fiber product. The woven carbon is then baked and cured in an oven.

So the end result is a composite skin that is much stronger than traditional aircraft structures. For example, when the 787 is flying, the wings will flex upward by about 12 feet to absorb the bumps as the aircraft moves through the sky.

The use of composites is not exactly new. Military aircraft have used composites for a couple of decades. The B-777 also uses a relatively large amount of composite. But the 787 is the first large commercial aircraft to incorporate so much into the actual airframe.

The 787 testing program has gone quite well. The 787 has met all of its design parameters, and exceeded most of them. The wings and fuselage are among the strongest structures ever placed into commercial flight.

Just for comparison, the U.S. Air Force recently had a B-2 bomber crash on Guam. The B-2 is technology from the 1980s, and is built with quite a bit of composite. Despite the crash and subsequent fire, the airframe itself was entirely recognizable. That is, the crash did not rip the plane to shreds, as is common with aluminum airframes. That’s how strong composites are.

No, the manufacturers don’t recommend that you crash airplanes, military or commercial. But the point is that composite airframes are immensely strong and, in many respects, superior to traditional aluminum.

My first impression of the 787 up close was that it is “fatter” than I expected. I was expecting a long and thin airplane. But no, this is a twin-aisle passenger plane. So the aircraft is not so long and not so thin. Still, these are the early versions of an entire family of airplanes. There is a “stretch” version in design, just not under construction.

Building Complex Machines

Boeing has spent decades learning how to do what it does, which is building complex machines. Boeing takes parts from all over the world and assembles them into these large jet aircraft. Boeing has trained tens of thousands of its own engineers and workers and built up a vendor base of hundreds of thousands of other engineers and workers on several continents.

Broadly speaking, there is plenty that the energy industry could learn from Boeing about building large numbers of immensely complex systems that will have to operate safely and efficiently for many decades.

Byron W. King
Energy and Oil