Thursday, October 1, 2026
By Paul Archipley
On the outside, the Boeing Everett Factory still feels like a landmark you drive toward – a low-slung horizon of gray and white at the edge of Paine Field, with the Cascade foothills looming behind it, and the main runway stretching south. It’s massive even before you step through the doors, the kind of place that makes first-time visitors want to reach for their phones.
But they can’t. Not on this tour.
Before anyone boards the bus at the Boeing Future of Flight, the rules come first: no cameras, no cellphones, no purses, no backpacks – no personal items at all. Everything goes into lockers in the lobby. Children must be at least 4 feet tall. No carrying kids. No exceptions.
The tour is an 80-minute guided passage through the world’s largest factory – a place where airplanes are assembled in plain view and where the scale is so hard to grasp that guides like Christopher Summitt have learned to translate it into a story.
“Giant man-made cave,” Summitt calls it. “And those work bays, the six massive work bays, are like canyons within that cave. They really are. You would have to go back to the ancient world to find that scale of monumental human activity.” Summitt isn’t an engineer. And on the Boeing tour, that’s part of what makes him effective. “History and storytelling are my skills,” he said.
For visitors hoping to glimpse the machinery of modern aviation, the Boeing tour offers something simple and rare: a front-row view from a factory balcony, high above the assembly line, watching a wide-body jet take shape below – and a guide who knows how to turn what you’re seeing into something you can feel.
Summitt’s relationship with Boeing began long before he ever held a microphone. “I grew up at the end of the runway,” he said. “I saw much of this go up as a child.” His house at the south end of Paine Field was close enough that the rumble of engines became part of the neighborhood soundscape. Boeing wasn’t a distant corporate name; it was the place where parents worked, where family friends’ paychecks came from, where the region’s fortunes rose and fell in waves.
His father was part of that world. “My father helped design the flight controls on the 727, all the way to the triple seven,” Summitt said, still using the affectionate shorthand Boeing people tend to adopt. “So I couldn’t help but learn the lore of this place … from dad blowing off steam at night when he got home.”
But he didn’t follow his father into Boeing engineering. In fact, he made a point of choosing a different path. “So long as he worked at Boeing, I had to have a different career. There’d never be a conflict of interest between us. Important when you work at Boeing.”
Instead, he leaned into bringing history to life. He got his start with the National Park Service, working nearly a thousand miles away at Little Bighorn – the Custer battlefield in Montana. He did archeological work and helped tell the story of a battle most know through various Hollywood versions.
He then went into law enforcement in Los Angeles County, working in sheriff’s department court services. When supervisors learned he could speak clearly and command a room, he found himself briefing jurors – a job that, in hindsight, sounds like an early rehearsal for guiding groups through Boeing.
But Los Angeles wasn’t home. “Dad said, ‘What you’re doing down there, you could do a lot safer up here.’ I decided I’m not really cut out for law enforcement. I don’t like being pushy.”
When a Boeing Future of Flight job fair opened a door, he stepped through. “Good heavens, yes,” he remembered thinking when the call came. “It’s right in my backyard. This is home.”
He started as a tour guide in 2009, 17 years ago. Over time, he learned the thing that makes a tour guide more than a script reader: You’re not just delivering information – you’re reading a room, anticipating questions, and managing a moving group inside a working factory. “The tour operation is a logistical achievement,” he said. He meant it literally.
Visitors begin at Boeing’s Future of Flight, where gallery exhibits highlight current and future Boeing products and services, and the Sky Deck offers photo opportunities with views of the factory, the Cascade Range, and Paine Field’s runways. Then it’s on to the main event – inside the factory, to the observation balcony for a view of current 777-777X production.
What people don’t always realize is that the tour is as much choreography as it is storytelling, Summitt said. You count your group as they leave the theater. You count again. The factory is enormous, the pace is timed, and no guide wants to be the person who loses track of a visitor in a place built for moving airplanes, not wandering tourists.
So successful guides do two things at once: they keep the group safe and on time, and they make the experience vivid enough that people forget they’re following a schedule. Summitt doesn’t want visitors merely impressed; he wants to help them translate immensity into something graspable. He points to the bays like canyons, and frames the building not as a set of dimensions but as a human accomplishment, a “monumental” act of construction that still functions like a living city.
When Summitt started, the tour looked different. It included a window into the factory’s past – the 747 era – alongside the newer lines. “In those times, the tour visited the 747 first. The audience would have to walk 800 feet to the middle of the building and then take the huge freight elevator up to the balcony.” He remembers the feel of the old manufacturing style: massive cranes, huge sections moved like ship hull pieces, the factory floor resembling “a shipyard at Bremerton or Harland and Wolff at Belfast.”
“You made major assemblies – head, body, wing, and tail – and then, by crane, took them for the final body join. For a visitor, it was a chance to see how a legendary airplane was built. For Summitt, it was a chance to connect people not just to machines but to the history of work, to the “ways of our fathers,” as he put it.
Then the world changed. The pandemic had begun. The 747 program began shutting down, and the tour shifted its focus. Now, the Everett experience centers on the 777-777X assembly line, with the site continuing to evolve. Summitt anticipates more change ahead: the possibility of new work coming through, the way Boeing’s production ecosystems shift between Everett and Renton, and how logistics tie Washington’s aerospace heartbeat to rail routes that start far away.
He can’t help himself. Even the shipping story becomes a kind of folktale – fuselages moving by rail from Wichita through Montana and across open country, a reminder that a jetliner is assembled in Everett, but it’s sourced from pretty much everywhere. The details he chooses aren’t random. He’s always aiming for what will land with a mixed group – aviation buffs, casual tourists, kids pulled along by parents, visitors who don’t speak English fluently. When he says the tour is logistics, he doesn’t only mean moving bodies. He means moving understanding.
Tour guides get the same kinds of questions again and again, Summitt said, and often they’re shaped by headlines. The most frequent question is typically about something they’ve heard in the news. He tries to “soften” the conversation, not to avoid reality, but because the factory floor is not a place for speculation.
The most recent example, perhaps, is when a door plug fell off a Boeing 737 MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines in January 2024. Visitors ask questions. “These kinds of things I cannot answer. Too much importance would be put on what I say. We will wait for the investigation to be done.” Instead, he returns to a principle he believes the public should hear more often. “Remember, you’re building this thing as if your own family is going to be flying on it.”
That’s the frame he trusts: human care, workmanship, accountability. It’s also how he talks about the workers – the tens of thousands of people whose jobs turn the factory into a 24-hour operation. Asked what he wishes the public better understood, he didn’t hesitate. “Just to better appreciate it is a lot of work, and it’s work that’s got to be just so. There’s a reason for the good salary.”
He doesn’t romanticize the factory as a flawless place. He describes it as a “modern laboratory” of problem-solving on the cusp of changes driven by computer design, sustainable fuels, and shifting market demands. But he also sees it as a community anchor that has shaped Snohomish County for decades, building roads and school additions, drawing families in and, sometimes, scattering them when programs collapse.
He remembers the hard years as a kid. “When (the supersonic transport program) didn’t go through, they laid off a lot of people.” And then came the oil crisis. “Of eight families on our block, by the fall of 1973 there were just two left. That was the Halloween that had no trick-or-treaters. You don’t forget that.” Even now, the emotional center of his tour often circles back to the airplane that made Everett a global symbol: the 747.
Summitt ends many tours with the same reference because, as he puts it, “Everybody universally knows about it.” People ask why Boeing stopped building the 747. He gives a practical answer – the world changed, routes changed, efficiency changed – and then he offers something rarer: memory. He tells visitors about standing on the Sky Deck and watching the last 747 that Boeing would ever make take off.
“The very last 747 took off from that 9,000-foot runway beside me. Up there are employees who come out of retirement, old timers, now saying farewell to the last one.”
In his telling, the plane waits at the end of the runway “almost like she was looking at us,” engines rising, the “great lady” lifting away. And then – a detail that sticks in people’s throats because it sounds like the closing line of a story – he remembers the air traffic controller’s voice: “So long, Queen of the Skies.”
Summitt has built a career out of that kind of moment: not the viral clip, not the technical breakdown, but the human line that makes a massive thing feel intimate.
A colleague who took Summitt’s tour last spring described it as “phenomenal … so poignant that it brings people to tears,” because Summitt’s connection to the place is not abstract. It’s family and neighborhood, pride and grief, scale and safety. It’s the belief that the story of Boeing isn’t only the story of airplanes. It’s the story of people who build them, and the communities that grow up beneath their flight paths.
After 17 years, Summitt still insists that awe doesn’t wear off. “Every tour is different.” He listens for laughter in the theater to gauge English fluency. He watches the clock, the radio, the elevator delays. He reshapes his material in real time, because the line between a great tour and a muddled one can be as simple as a late bus or a crowded elevator.
And when he steps onto that balcony and sees visitors’ faces tilt down toward the factory floor, and the sheer volume of the place hits them, he knows the job is working.
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