With more than 1.2 million square feet of usable space, Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner Final Assembly Plant in North Charleston, S.C., is a state-of-the-art facility with a building footprint that encloses an area the equivalent of 12 football fields. The design-build project required Raleigh, N.C.-based MR&D to install 296,000 square feet of Lewisville, Texas-based Metl-Span’s CF42 3-inch Mesa insulated metal wall panels in Boeing Blue and Polar White. Members of the designbuild team included BE&K Building Group, Charlotte, N.C.; Turner Construction Co., Greenville, S.C.; and Melbourne, Fla.-based BRPH Cos.
Located on 150 acres, the building is 614
feet wide by 1,037 feet long. The site required extensive remediation, including the removal of 3.1 million cubic yards of inert material and replacing it with an engineered sand fill. The facility also contains 18,000 tons of structural steel, including columns measuring 86 feet to the bottom of the trusses and 114 feet to the peak of the roof. There are also 11 trusses with a 464-foot clear span and a total span length of 614 feet. The trusses support numerous plane-assembly cranes, each weighing more than 50 tons.
Metl-Span,
