X-Ray
Every day on our ride home, the Unindicted Co-Conspirator and I pass Boston's Logan International Airport and see an aircraft hanger sporting a life-size x-ray of a jet airplane. Since we live here, we're pretty blasé about our neighborhood until someone asks. But finally someone did ask, so here's the story of the x-ray hanger.
United Airlines has a hanger that's highly visible to anyone travelling out of the airport onto Route 1A. The intent of the project was to create a striking look for Logan's hanger row. After all, aircraft hangers look downright old-fashioned nowadays. A design firm named Pentagram was hired to develop something new. Designers Michael Bierut and Brett Taylor came up with the idea of using an x-ray image of what might be going on inside the hanger.
Taylor worked with an x-ray photographer to get an x-ray of an entire Boeing 777. They then made a few changes, adding x-ray photographs of scale model parts like the wings and engines, which were too dense to show up as anything but a white lines and circles in the real x-ray. United didn't care for the rather macabre image of the skeletal pilot and technicians, so those image were made from photographic negatives.
I stand corrected. The "x-ray" was not really made by that technology, it was created by a Boeing CAD program.
Once the picture was approved, the next question was how it could be transferred to the hanger. The United Airlines hanger isn't built of solid metal or wood. The walls are made of Dupont Tedlar vinyl. The decision was made to create a self-adhesive graphic, like the ones you see on tour buses and pizza delivery vehicles. But how can can you stick long strips of art perfectly and evenly on a surface that isn't perfectly stable and solid?
The designers engaged Mega Media Concepts, an advertising company, to work out the details. They turned to 3M, who developed a proprietary method to apply and seal the decal to the vinyl wall.
It was a precision operation. As anyone who has ever hung wallpaper knows, a slight miscalculation at the top means a major problem at the bottom. The surface to be covered was 250 feet by 80 feet, so the print was made in four-foot wide sections. Obviously, color had to match exactly. Finally, the hanger is curved, with many jutting pieces and bends. These all had to be taken into consideration.
The result is stunning. According to designer Brett Taylor, "United Airlines received several phone calls from people who work facing the hanger - they wanted United to know that the hanger had been left open by mistake!"
The work was finished in August of 2001. It's still in perfect shape. Check it out if you're ever in the neighborhood.