MUKILTEO – The Future of Flight is now.
Michael O’Leary / The Herald
Western Washington’s newest aerospace museum is poised to open this weekend at Paine Field.
After a VIP-studded ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday, the Future of Flight Aviation Center &Boeing Tour will open to the public at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, offering interactive educational displays about jets and jet-building and guided tours of Boeing’s 777 assembly line.
“We feel like we’re being sucked down a drainpipe,” said Future of Flight marketing director Sandy Ward. “The closer you get to the bottom, it starts spinning like a tornado. It’s spinning faster and faster, and it’s exciting.”
The Future of Flight has been a long time coming. Backers first approached Snohomish County officials to discuss public funding for a Paine Field aircraft museum in 2001. Eventually, the county public facilities district ended up providing $3.6 million toward building the $23.5 million facility, which is jointly owned by the county, the Boeing Co. and the private Future of Fight Foundation.
Backers are optimistic that the Future of Flight will prove to be a big tourist draw for the county.
The Boeing factory tour is already one of the area’s biggest attractions, bringing in more than 100,000 people a year. With the opening of the Future of Flight, the tour for the first time will be offered on weekends – something Boeing expects will double attendance.
In addition, the tour will move out of a cramped trailer set in the middle of a Boeing parking lot and into a spacious new building. Visitors will start walking down a hallway filled with displays of Boeing’s history before watching a movie in the Future of Flight’s new digital theater and boarding a bus to the factory.
Tours will return to drop off visitors at an expanded Boeing Store, which is next door to the Future of Flight gift shop.
Organizers are taking a different approach with the museum itself. Instead of stuffing it full of antique airplanes and duplicating the Museum of Flight in Seattle, it will feature displays that explain how airplanes work and where the technology is headed.
In the Future of Flight’s Propulsion Zone, for example, there are displays of engines that powered the earliest de Havilland Comets and Boeing 707s, set next to a giant Pratt &Whitney engine taken from a 777.
One of the most striking displays – the 41-foot-tall vertical tail fin from a 747 – was one of the most problematic.
It was on a plane parked in an Arizona storage yard, set to be moved by rail to Everett, when hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf Coast and disrupted rail shipments nationwide. It took weeks to arrange for a suitable rail car to move the fin north.
The fin is the largest piece on display in the gallery, and had to be in place before the rest of the displays could be installed. That forced the postponement of the Future of Flight’s opening, which originally was set for Oct. 28.
Friday’s ribbon-cutting is an invitation-only event. Gov. Christine Gregoire will be on hand, along with a number of other dignitaries.
On Saturday, the doors will open to the public. Ward said Future of Flight staffers have been living and breathing the museum for months.
“We’re just excited to share it with the rest of the world,” she said.
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@ heraldnet.com.
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