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Boeing’s aerospace store brings unique aviation experience
The latest edition of the Boeing Store Custom Hangar Catalog — featuring a collection of furniture and artwork derived from genuine aircraft parts — is now available. Offerings include a bench made from a 727-200 jetliner wing slat; a B-17 Flying Fortress propeller blade; and a sleek bar made from the engine of a DC-9/MD-80 airliner.
September 16, 2016 By Boeing
Buyers and craftspeople for the Custom Hangar climb through aviation boneyards and storage facilities in search of rare artifacts that they refurbish and finish by hand. Each piece is placed in a museum-quality mounting fabricated using authentic materials such as aviation-grade aluminum, steel, and titanium.
The result? Pieces that are at once beautiful, functional and historically significant. Most of the artifacts logged numerous hours of service, gaining a patina that the Custom Hangar craftspeople work to retain. The metal surface of an engine blade from an F-4 Phantom II fighter jet ($90), for example, is naturally discoloured by the high temperatures reached in generating sufficient thrust to propel the jet at speeds up to Mach 2.2. An aluminum window frame ($695) from the first jumbo jet model, the 747-100, features lines of rivets that withstood the strain of more than 100,000 hours in the air.
Despite the scarcity of the artifacts, this isn’t an out-of-reach fantasy collection. Pieces range in price from $50 for a specially gift-boxed pen made out of a 747 circuit-breaker tab, to $5,900 for an industrial-chic bench built around a leading-edge slat removed from the wing of a 727-200 jetliner, to $9,500 for a gleaming aluminum and stainless-steel wine bar made from the engine case of a retired DC-9/MD-80 airliner.
Artifacts in the catalog represent a selection of current Custom Hangar offerings. Additional items are available online at BoeingStore.com and in select Boeing Store retail outlets nationwide. New artifacts are discovered and added constantly. “Sometimes it’s like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark,” said Gerardo Mores, Custom Hangar buyer and product developer. “We don’t know what’s inside the shipping crate until we open it!”
