Hangar

Hangars are used for protection from the weather, direct sunlight and for maintenance, repair, manufacture, assembly and storage of aircraft.

The Wright brothers stored and repaired their aircraft in a wooden hangar 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 Hills only to find their hangar damaged.

Carl Richard Nyberg used a hangar to store his 1908 Flugan (fly) in the early 20th century and 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.

Bleriot was in a race to be the first man to cross the English Channel in a heavier-than-air aircraft, and he and set up his headquarters in the unused shed.

In Britain, the earliest aircraft hangars were known as aeroplane sheds, and the oldest survivors of these are at Larkhill, Wiltshire.

Sheds built for rigid airships survive at Moffett Field, California; Akron, Ohio; Weeksville, North Carolina; Lakehurst, New Jersey; Santa Cruz Air Force Base in Brazil; and Cardington, Bedfordshire.

The hangar also provided service and storage for the airships USS Los Angeles, Akron, Macon, as well as the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg.

[2] Bases with wooden hangars included: the Naval Air Stations at South 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).

The company went into insolvency and in June 2003, the facilities were sold off and the airship hangar was converted to a 'tropical paradise'-themed indoor holiday resort called Tropical Islands, which opened in 2004.

In August 2014, the American FAA proposed legislation of how a hangar can be used on airfields that receive government funding.