When Factories Learned to Fly

Willow Run applied Detroit mass production to the sky and churned out B-24 Liberators at roughly one per hour, over 8,600 in total. Castle Bromwich delivered more than 11,000 Spitfires, and Boeing Everett grew into the largest building on Earth by volume, about 13 million cubic meters, to build the 747.

NASA Michoud, which welded Saturn V stages, now builds the SLS core stage on the same 43 acre floor. Trace these landmark plants in our aviation factory pages, where wartime urgency and jumbo jets reshaped what a factory could be..