I've been warned. "The coolfactor inhere is pretty awesome," says Kim Westenskow, Boeing's 787 factory superintendent, Position 4, as she escorts me to the assembly line in the company's Everett, Washington plant. But that's not the first thing that strikes you about this voluminous workspace, 380 feet wide and 10 football fields long. It's the absence of industrial racket. The Dreamliner's molded composite constituents are bolted together, and the holes are bored to the whir of air-driven, fluid-cooled, diamond-tipped drills. The aluminum 747 a few doors down requires drilling more than a million holes in metal, a process accompanied by ear-splitting fusillades of rivet guns and hammers. "They're the other guys," Westenskow explains. "The loud ones. We're the quiet bunch."
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