We were up early this morning mainly due to the effects of -8 hours time difference.
As we are in the home town of the US aircraft manufacturer, Boeing, we had booked a Boeing Factory tour to the nearby Paine Field. The tour consists of firstly visiting the ‘Future of Flight’ building next to the Boeing facility and then going with a guide to the largest building by volume in the world, where four types of Boeing aircraft are assembled.
The ‘Future of Flight’ exhibition tracks Boeing’s roots from 1916 all the way through to their more recent space work.
We then went on the 11am tour with 49 other people in our coach and another coach with the same number. We did not expect that the Boeing Factory tour would be so popular with more than 100 people going on just the 11am tour in two groups. Tours ran through the day.
Unfortunately, for health and safety reasons, Boeing does not allow any personal items such a phones and cameras to be taken on the tour so no pictures.
We visited the B767 and B747 assembly lines first. To get there, we all got off the bus at one end of the assembly building and walked through part of the many miles of tunnels Boeing has underneath and then went up in a lift to a viewing gallery overlooking the assembly line.
The B747-8 and B767 aircraft are now only made in freighter configuration which is no doubt very useful for one of Seattle’s other major residents, Amazon.
We then got back on the coach to travel to the far end of the world’s biggest building by volume, to visit the B787 and B777 assembly lines. Our guide extolled the environmental virtues of the B787, Boeing’s aircraft made of composite materials rather than aluminium, and we saw some freighter versions of the B777 on the assembly line.
Our guide had mentioned that Boeing was currently testing the new B777x and we were lucky enough that it was on the Paine Field runway right outside the Future of Flight building when we got back from the tour.

I bet some of you are wondering what our Boeing guide said about the recently grounded B737 Max aircraft. For those unaware of the story, the ‘Max’ is a new version of the very successful B737 aircraft for which Boeing currently has hundreds of orders but tragically two have crashed over the last few years and the aircraft type is currently grounded by the US Federal Aviation Authority.
Our guide, right at the beginning, said that there may be some things he was not allowed to talk about, so he didn’t. The only thing he said about the Max was that it was not assembled at this facility but at Renton, nearby.
If you are in Seattle, the Boeing Factory tour is worth going on and we were informed that it started when the first aircraft was made in 1916.
In the afternoon we walked to Chihuly Gardens next to the Space Needle viewing platform. We had heard of Dale Chihuly because of his exhibition of glassworks currently running at Kew Gardens (until 27 October). As we were in Seattle it would be an opportunity to see some of his diverse fine artworks at his own venue. These are exhibited both inside the buildings and in the gardens. Highly complex procedures are used to create his works, and it is testament to his skill and creativity that his glass installations are exhibited in more than 200 museums worldwide. We will let a few photos do the talking.


And we could not go to these gardens without visiting the viewing decks of the Space Needle. Built in the 1960s, it was well worth the visit as it gave quite a different impression of Seattle. From the ground the view is of busy roads, high buildings and ongoing construction, but from the tower much water can be seen at Lake Union and Elliott Bay, and there is much more greenery than imagined at street level.



Tomorrow we go on the ‘Food Tour’ around Pikes Place Market to sample the best of Seattle’s cuisine.
Copyright: Words and photos John Cruse