Snohomish, WA
One of the rare American airports still run by the family that founded it. Brothers Noble and Eldon Harvey and family friend Wesley Loback built the field in 1944 on part of the Harvey homestead, settled in 1859; balloons had flown from the property as early as 1908. The restaurant, flight school, and hangars came in 1947, and it was named Harvey Field in 1951. Six generations of Harveys have run it since. Skydiving started here in 1961 with the Seattle Skydivers, the oldest parachute club in the country, and it is still a busy drop zone, with jumpers in the air on good-weather weekends. The field sits in the Snohomish River floodplain and flooded repeatedly until dikes went in after 1995. A turf runway parallels the paved strip and closes seasonally; the Buzz Inn on the field is the local pilot coffee stop. About 25nm NE of Seattle in the Snohomish Valley, Mount Rainier on the horizon to the south.
On the south side of KPAE Paine Field. The Boeing Everett Factory is the largest building in the world by volume — 472 million cubic feet, 98.3 acres under one roof, with its own internal weather (yes, occasional indoor clouds early in its history). Built 1967 to assemble the 747 after Boeing literally bet the company on the program. Every wide-body Boeing since (747, 767, 777, 787) was built here. In July 2026 the factory also began assembling the 737 MAX; the North Line is Boeing's fourth 737 line and the first outside the jet's longtime home at Renton. The Future of Flight Aviation Center runs the public factory tour — the only public access to a major commercial airliner assembly line in North America. The center has its own gallery of cockpits, components, and Boeing history. Tour times sell out — book ahead.
The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, opened in 1917, lift boats between saltwater Puget Sound and the freshwater Lake Washington Ship Canal; they are the busiest locks in the United States by vessel count. A fish ladder beside them carries salmon upstream past the dam. The locks hold back the lakes, which sit about twenty feet above the Sound.
Lake Union sits right in the middle of Seattle and is one of the busiest seaplane bases in the country. Kenmore Air and others fly scheduled floatplane service from the south end of the lake out to the San Juans, the Gulf Islands, and Victoria, taking off and landing on the water with the downtown skyline behind. Floatplanes have worked off this lake since the 1940s.
Lake Washington carries two of the longest floating bridges on earth. The Evergreen Point Bridge on SR-520, rebuilt in 2016, is the longest at about 7,700 feet of floating span; the I-90 crossing just to the south is close behind. They float because the lake is too deep and soft-bottomed for ordinary piers, so the roadway rides on hollow concrete pontoons.