Ahangar is a building or structure designed to holdaircraft orspacecraft. Hangars are built of metal, wood, or concrete. The wordhangar comes from Middle Frenchhanghart ("enclosure near a house"), of Germanic origin, from Frankish *haimgard ("home-enclosure", "fence around a group of houses"), from *haim ("home, village, hamlet") andgard ("yard"). The term,gard, comes from the Old Norsegarðr ("enclosure, garden").
Hangars are used for protection from the weather, direct sunlight and for maintenance, repair, manufacture, assembly and storage of aircraft.
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TheWright brothers stored and repaired their aircraft in a wooden hangar constructed in 1902 atKill Devil Hills inNorth Carolina for theirglider. After completing design and construction of theWright Flyer inOhio, the brothers returned to Kill Devil Hills only to find their hangar damaged. They repaired the structure and constructed a new workshop while they waited for theFlyer to be shipped.
Carl Richard Nyberg used a hangar to store his 1908Flugan (fly) in the early 20th century and in 1909,Louis Bleriot crash-landed on a northern French farm inLes Baraques (betweenSangatte andCalais) and rolled hismonoplane into the farmer's cattle pen. Bleriot was in a race to be the first man to cross theEnglish Channel in aheavier-than-air aircraft, and he and set up his headquarters in the unused shed. In Britain, the earliest aircraft hangars were known asaeroplane sheds, and the oldest survivors of these are atLarkhill, Wiltshire. These were built in 1910 for the Bristol School of Flying and are now Grade II*Listed buildings. British aviation pioneerAlliott Verdon Roe built one of the first aeroplane sheds in 1907 atBrooklands, Surrey and full-size replicas of this and the 1908 Roe biplane are on display atBrooklands Museum.
As aviation became established in Britain before World War I, standard designs of hangar gradually appeared with military types too such as theBessonneau hangar and the side-opening aeroplane shed of 1913, both of which were soon adopted by theRoyal Flying Corps. Examples of the latter survive atFarnborough,Filton andMontrose airfields. During World War I, other standard designs included the RFC General Service Flight Shed and the Admiralty F-Type of 1916, the General Service Shed (featuring the characteristicBelfast-truss roof and built-in various sizes) and theHandley Page aeroplane shed (1918).
Sheds built for rigid airships survive atMoffett Field, California;Akron, Ohio;Weeksville, North Carolina;Lakehurst, New Jersey;Santa Cruz Air Force Base in Brazil; andCardington, Bedfordshire. Steel rigid airship hangars are some of the largest in the world.
Hangar 1, Lakehurst, is located atNaval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst (formerly Naval Air Station Lakehurst), New Jersey. The structure was completed in 1921 and is typical of airship hangar designs of World War I. The site is best known for theHindenburg disaster, when on May 6, 1937, the German airshipHindenburg crashed and burned while landing. Hangar No.1 at Lakehurst was used to build and store the AmericanUSSShenandoah. The hangar also provided service and storage for the airships USSLos Angeles,Akron,Macon, as well as theGraf Zeppelin and theHindenburg.
The largest hangars ever built include theGoodyear Airdock measuring 1,175x325x211 feet[1] andHangar One (Mountain View, California) measuring 1,133 ft × 308 ft × 198 ft (345 m × 94 m × 60 m). TheGoodyear Airdock, is in Akron, Ohio and the structure was completed on November 25, 1929. The Airdock was used for the construction of the USSAkron and her sister ship, the USSMacon.
Hangar One atMoffett Federal Field (formerlyNaval Air Station Moffett Field), is located inMountain View, California. The structure was completed in 1931. It housed the USSMacon.
TheU.S. Navy establishedmore airship operations during WWII. As part of this, ten "lighter-than-air" (LTA) bases across the United States were built as part of the coastal defence plan; a total of 17 hangars were built. Hangars at these bases are some of the world's largest freestanding timber structures.[2] Bases with wooden hangars included: the Naval Air Stations atSouth Weymouth, Massachusetts (1 hangar); Lakehurst, New Jersey (2); Weeksville, North Carolina (1); Glynco, Georgia (2); Richmond, Florida (3); Houma, Louisiana (1); Hitchcock, Texas (1);Tustin (Santa Ana), California (2); Moffett Field, California (2) and Tillamook, Oregon (2). Of the seventeen, only seven remain,Moffett Federal Field, (former NAS Moffett Field), California (2); formerTustin, California (former NAS Santa Ana and MCAS Tustin), California (2);Tillamook Air Museum/Tillamook Airport (former NAS Tillamook), Oregon (1) andJoint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst/Naval Support Activity Lakehurst (former NAS Lakehurst), New Jersey (2).[3]
A hangar for Cargolifter was built atBrand-Briesen Airfield 1,180 ft (360 m) long, 705 ft (215 m) wide and 348 ft (106 m) high and is a free standing steel-dome "barrel-bowl" construction large enough to fit theEiffel Tower on its side. The company went intoinsolvency and in June 2003, the facilities were sold off and theairship hangar was converted to a 'tropical paradise'-themed indoor holiday resort calledTropical Islands, which opened in 2004.
An alternative to the fixed hangar is a portable shelter that can be used for aircraft storage and maintenance. Portablefabric structures can be built up to 215 ft (66 m) wide, 100 ft (30 m) high and any length. They are able to accommodate several aircraft and can be increased in size and even relocated when necessary.[citation needed]
Hangars need special structures to be built. The width of the doors have to be large; this includes the aircraft entrance.The bigger the aircraft to be introduced, the more complex a structure is needed. According to the span of the hangar, sizes can be classified thus:
| Size | Span (meters) |
|---|---|
| S | Less than 30 m |
| M | 30–60 m |
| L | 60–90 m |
| XL | 90–120 m |
| XXL | More than 120 m |
XXL hangars are built for the largest aircraft in the world like theAirbus A380,Boeing 747 and theAntonov 225, which are the most complex to erect.[4]
Hangars are usually regulated by the building codes in the countries and jurisdictions and airports where they reside. In August 2014, the American FAA proposed legislation of how a hangar can be used on airfields that receive government funding. The definition of allowed activities included final assembly of aircraft.[5]
Airship hangars or airship sheds are generally larger than conventional aircraft hangars, particularly in height. Most early airships usedhydrogen gas to provide them with sufficient buoyancy for flight, so their hangars had to provide protection from stray sparks to keep the gas from exploding. Hangars that held several airships were at risk from chain-reaction explosions. For this reason, most hangars for hydrogen-based airships were built to house only one or two such craft. During the "Golden Age" of airship travel from 1900, mooring masts and sheds were constructed to build and house airships. The British government built a shed inKarachi for theR101, the Brazilian government built one inRio de Janeiro, theHangar do Zeppelin [pt] for the GermanZeppelins, and the U.S. government constructedMoffett Field,Mountain View, California andLakehurst Naval Air Station,Lakehurst, New Jersey.
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Manywarships carry aircraft and will often have hangars for storage and maintenance. Such hangars may be situated adjacent to theflight deck oncruisers,destroyers andfrigates or underneath the flight deck withelevators to lift the aircraft onaircraft carriers andamphibious assault ships. On some vessels where space is short the hangar and flight deck share the same space, with the hangar stowing away for flight operations.
A hangar home[citation needed] is a residence that includes a hangar attached or integrated into the house, where the owner is able to park their privately owned aircraft. Hangar Homes are usually found in residential airparks.
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