Hangar

hangar

a large workshop or building for storing and maintaining aircraft

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hangar [′haŋ·ər]

(civil engineering)

A building at an airport specially designed in height and width to enable aircraft to be stored or maintained in it.

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hangar

A shed or shelter, particularly a structure for the shelter, service, and repair of aircraft.

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Hangar 

an installation for the storage, maintenance, and repair of airplanes and helicopters. In prerevolutionary Russia wooden hangars of simple design about 25 m wide were built. One of the first steel hangars (20.8 m wide) was built in Königsberg in 1913. In the USSR standard metal hangars 36–45 m wide were built at permanent airports in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.

Modern hangars vary a great deal in planning and design. The type of hangar used depends on the type and number of aircraft to be serviced and on the nature of the maintenance equipment. The most common hangars have a rectangular profile and are of arch or frame construction; they often are more than 100 m wide. Depending on their function, the following types of hangars are distinguished: storage hangars, in which the main building is used for the parking, maintenance, and preventive inspection of aircraft and for the storage of detachable units and spare parts; and shop hangars, for the repair of airplanes, helicopters, and aircraft engines. Shop hangars include several production and everyday administrative premises, which are usually housed in annexes to the main building. Hangars are also subdivided according to the type of construction: stationary (permanent structure), which are built at permanent and military base airports and helicopter stations, with supporting structural elements of metal or reinforced concrete; temporary, designed for short-term service, usually of wood; and collapsible, with structural elements of steel or light alloys designed for field airports. An efficient design for the latter type of hangar is the pneumatic framework design, which consists of a supporting framework (for instance, made up of tubular metal arches) and an outer covering of canvas or synthetic coating.

Hangars have hoisting and transportation devices (such as carts and mobile cranes), means of communications and signaling, automatic fire extinguishers, and so on. Stationary hangars have movable and nonmovable platforms and gangways to make the maintenance and repair of the aircraft more convenient: electric power, compressed air, and oxygen is conveyed to them. The gates of the hangar are usually made of separate panels that automatically open horizontally or vertically. Accordion-type gates are also used. The platform in front of the hangar is linked up with the runway of the airport. The design and space arrangement of modern hangars often reaches a high architectural and artistic expressiveness, such as the hangars built by P. L. Nervi in Italy in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s.

F. IA. ZAITSEV and D. A. MOGILEVSKII