[Throwback June] I have always wanted to visit the airplane maintenance center but I didn’t get lucky with my school’s group when they organised 1 English and 1 Japanese tour group for students. Reservations for either ANA and JAL starts 6 months prior but it is so difficult to plan 6 months in advance unless you are really traveling for travel.
So I just decided on a whim one random weekend, to check out the possibility of joining the ANA maintenance facility tour last minute as some people might cancel last minute. Then I managed to find 1 Friday afternoon that had 2 slots left for us to go. So we took the Tokyo Monorail to head to Shin Seibijou Station and walked like 15 minutes before arriving at the Maintenance office for ANA where we would show them the confirmation email to get admission into the building and get our lanyard for the tour.
There are 4 time slots for the tour and we took the last tour at 15:00 – 16:30, while waiting for our tour to commence we window shopped a little checking out the ANA goods.
Took touristy photos with the plane models and ANA-Gundam.
Then it was a 30 minutes video and interactive session with the guests for the tour where we watched videos with regards to ANA’s vision and motto and their commitment to service. A short video of how an aeroplane is prepped and readied for a flight followed by some physics experiments showing how the aeroplanes soar in the sky. Finally we were broken up into small groups to start our tour of the maintenance facility.
Of course, there was also some displays in the audience hall for us to take photos too.
Complimentary Souvenir for the day.
Starting our way into the mysterious hangar. (at least for me)
Everyone have to wear a safety helmet since the site we were visiting is really where the real aeroplanes are being maintained.
Short video of the day.
I was in awed of the sheer size.
We were lucky to get to see them working on an aeroplane.
While inside, listen to instructions carefully and do not touch anything. The crew is really working on the maintenance of the aeroplane which would soar into air. We wouldn’t want to obstruct their work, don’t we.
The size of each door is the size as a swimming pool and there were 18 of them.
Heavy equipments all over.
The floors was painted with these indicators so they would know where to park the planes and move the needed equipments around efficiently.
The maze!
It wasn’t intentional for me to wear the similar ANA colors 😛
The crew working hard.
We were not allowed to step out of the hangar but it was amazing to get so up close and personal with the planes and getting to see many planes take off from Haneda in the hangar.
After the walkabout, we ended our maitenance facility tour. We could either keep the lanyard for keepsake or throw it into the recycling bin before we exit the building.
Link to ANA maintenance facility tour: http://www.ana.co.jp/cp/kengaku/index.html
Link to JAL maintenance facility tour: https://www.jal.co.jp/kengaku/
PS: My friend went to the JAL one instead and you get to wear the pilot and cabin crew uniform for photos over there. ANA do not have such an activity. Otherwise the tours are pretty similar.
Xuan's Howdy Days 