Where Boeing built its empire, three ways
Three fields on the eastern shore of Puget Sound, each one a different chapter of the Boeing story. Renton is the 737 final assembly line — the most-produced commercial airliner family in history, with every 737 ever built (over 11,000 of them) rolling out the door at the south end of Lake Washington. Boeing Field, two miles south of downtown Seattle, is where the original Model 1 floatplane flew in 1916 and where the Museum of Flight now keeps the first 747, the first 707, a Concorde, an SR-71, and the original Air Force One. Paine Field in Everett is where 747s, 777s, and 787s were assembled — the 98-acre building there is the largest building in the world by volume.