Extra! Extra! Engineering – We know Hangars!

On December 17, 1903 Wilbur and Orville Wright completed four brief flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina inventing the first successful airplane. Since then these marvels of aviation make up on average 102,465 flights a day, and they come in all shapes and sizes. From private jets to twin turboprops to airliners, all these planes need places to be manufactured and stored. Members of the Bennett & Pless team have just the structural know-how to construct these aviation hangars.

Recently we caught up with Senior Structural Engineer, Norbert “Norb” Wachowski, on what goes into the design of aviation hangars. Norb has over 35 years of structural and civil engineering experience in designing aviation hangars. The typical airplane hangar is a hybrid building combination of a conventional steel structure and a pre-engineered building structure. There are multiple roof rafters that span from the rear to the front that are part of the pre-engineered frames. The metal roofing, metal siding, girts, and purlins are all part of the pre-engineered portion of the building. The conventional steel box truss and conventional steel towers support the roof rafters and the hangar door. 

Norb dove into one of his favorite hangar projects, which was a corrosion control hangar in West Virginia for the West Virginia Air National Guard C-5 airplane. The C-5 Galaxy plane is a large military transport aircraft originally designed and built by Lockheed, and now maintained and upgraded by its successor, Lockheed Martin. It provides the United States Air Force with a heavy intercontinental-range strategic airlift capability, one that can carry outsized and oversized loads, including all air-certifiable cargo. The structural design for this large aircraft required 80,000 square feet of space for the hangar facility. It consisted of a high bay for the craft and a lower bay for maintenance shops.

The high bay structure design articulated long-span steel truss frames with tapered building columns. The roof steps up over the center section of the aircraft to maintain the required clearances and have a curved roof shape above the tail and fuselage area of the C-5 aircraft. The frames at the front of the hangar are designed to support a fabric type hangar door.

Working on the massive hangar for the West Virginia Air National Guard was one of many complex hangar projects our team has put their hard work and dedication into. Understanding the structural restrictions and elements that go into designing these aviation storage buildings, requires expertise coordinating all pieces to work seamlessly together. We look forward to all the aviation hangar projects to come sending Norb and our Bennett & Pless team soaring to new heights.