Daily Vocabulary for Better Conversation

A cutaway diagram of a hangar.

A hangar is a metal, wooden, or concrete structure designed to hold one or many aircraft in protective storage. Hangars may be used to protect aircraft from weather or enemy attack (if in a wartime environment), when undergoing repairs, or are simply not in use. Any type of aircraft can be housed in a hangarsome very large ones were constructed to house dirigibles during refueling and boarding. Hangars may be on land or on ships. Aircraft carrier vessels have hangars. The word hangar comes from a northern French dialect, and literally means cattle pen.

Hangars can be used to hold fixed-wing aircraft, rotary-wing aircraft (helicopters), and lighter-than-air ships.

A 1935 advertisement for REIDsteels' hangars.

The Wright Flyer sitting outside the aircraft's makeshift hangar.

Carl Rickard Nyberg used a hangar to store his Flugan in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

In 1909, Louis Bleriot crash-landed on a northern French farm in Les Baraques (between Sangatte and Calais) and rolled his monoplane into the farmer's cattle pen. At the time, Bleriot was in a race to be the first man to cross the English Channel in a heavier-than-air aircraft, so he set up headquarters in the unused shed. After returning home, Bleriot called REIDsteel, the maker of the cattle pen, and ordered three hangars for personal use. REIDsteel continues to make hangars and hangar parts to this day.

The Wright brothers stored and repaired their airplane in a wooden hangar they constructed in 1902 at Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina for their glider. After completing design and construction of the Wright Flyer in Ohio, the brothers returned to Kill Devil Hill only to find their hangar damaged. They repaired the structure and constructed a new workshop while they waited for the Flyer to be shipped.

A view of six helium-filled blimps being stored in one of the two massive hangars at the former Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin, California. The structures appear in the National Register of Historic Places as #NPS-#75000451.

Airship hangars (also referred to as airship sheds) are generally larger than conventional airplane hangars (particularly in terms of their overall height), which subjects them to different design constraints. Most early airships used hydrogen gas to provide them with sufficient buoyancy for flight, so their hangars therefore had to provide protection from stray sparks in order to prevent the flammable gas from exploding. Hangars that held multiple craft of this type were at risk from chain-reaction explosions. For this reason, most hangars for hydrogen-based airships were sized to house only one or two such craft.

With World War I on the horizon, hangar design had to keep pace with advances in aviation technology. Airships were becoming a standard for transoceanic travel. The Germans used Zeppelins to bomb Paris and London, while the British used blimps (non-rigid airships) to patrol their coasts.

During the Golden Age of airship travel, mooring masts and sheds were constructed at ports of call around the world. The largest of these, at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, was used for the construction of the USS Akron (ZRS-4) and USS Macon (ZRS-5). Its length was 1,175 ft (358 m) and its roof soared to 200 ft (61 m). Airship sheds survive at Moffett Field and Cardington, Bedfordshire.

The US Navy established a total of ten lighter-than-air (LTA) bases across the United States during World War II as part of the coastal defense plan, which required the construction of some of the world's largest freestanding wood structures. Seven of the original seventeen hangars still exist, with one of them now housing the Tillamook Air Museum in Tillamook, Oregon.

Hangar No. 2 at the former Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin, California. The structure measures 1,072 feet long by 292 feet wide by 192 feet tall, and is said to create its own weather due to the large volume of air inside.

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Hangar

Look up hangar in
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• Aircraft Hangars at BuildingsGuide.com
• Aircraft Hangars at AviationHangars.Org
• Marine Corps Air Station, Tustin at the California Military Musem official website
• Nick Challoner's photo history of British Hangars
• REIDsteel company website

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