Tour the Boeing Factory

Mukilteo, Washington

The only public tour of a commercial jet factory in North America -- a 80-minute guided walk though the world's largest building (472,000,000 cubic feet, 2.2 miles from end to end) to watch as commercial jetliners are assembled.

Participants are taken by shuttle bus to the plant, where a guide leads them through an underground tunnel and up a freight-and-passenger elevator. They arrive on a catwalk 35 feet above the factory floor. The plant has its own fire department, security force, medical clinic, water-treatment plant, electrical substations, coffee shops and restaurants. About 1,300 bicycles in the factory help employees get from one side of the building -- 75 football fields could fit inside of it -- to the other.

So large is the building that when it was built in 1968 it created its own weather. Clouds formed near the ceiling, threatening rain until an air-circulation system was installed.