As recently as 30 years ago, airport hangars were not objects of beauty. Externally, they were little more than massive sheds and inside they looked like gigantic oily garages. But things have changed dramatically, as David Smith explains
According to one of the leading engineers in the field, Steve Luke MBE, a director of Cardiff-based design, engineering and technical specialist Arup: “Hangars used to be made of plain concrete and painted grey all over and you’d see pigeons pooing everywhere. But they have improved over the years in parallel with technological developments to aircraft, which are now carbon fibre and require a lot of sophisticated equipment.”
At the world’s major hub airports, hangars are developed with far more care than used to be the case. Architects are hired to create brightly coloured, efficient and ergonomic designs. “You get that ‘McLaren’ feel. Inside, today’s hangars look like laboratories. Everyone has nice clean overalls and no one gets their hands dirty any more. Oil use is minimal and any spillage is cleaned up instantly,” he adds.
Jonathan Jewers, a director at the British hangar door specialist Jewers Doors, agrees with Luke that attitudes to hangar design have changed markedly. “Hub airports are now seen as gateways to a country and the architecture is very important to the airport authorities. They want fantastic architecture throughout the airport,” he observes. “If you fly into Dubai, you will see the hangars all along the side of the runway are high-end architectural statements. Dubai paid the best architects to produce the highest finishes, particularly on their MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) facilities. A lot of the time airports fund them and want them to look good. But even when the airlines pay for their own hangars, there’s pressure to produce a quality look to enhance their brand.”
Luke has been one of the leading proponents of the revolution in hangar development. He designed the British Airways maintenance hangar that is located at Cardiff International Airport, Wales. The structure, which opened in 1993, was a game-changer. It initiated a new approach to providing the laboratory-style design that is now prevalent.
“Our goal in Cardiff was to facilitate clean working. To achieve it we had to raise the quality of the working areas to assist operational efficiency. If a hangar is hundreds of metres long, you have to make sure everything is in the right place, or it might take half an hour to go to the loo,” he points out. “Internally, we planned Cardiff to be one of the world’s most efficient hangars, and I’m happy to say, we succeeded. The mechanics turn around BA’s heavy aircraft in the fastest times in the world. That’s partly down to the technicians, but it’s also down to the hangar design.”
The Cardiff hangar was also one of the first to pay due attention to the external appearance. As Luke says, it’s far more difficult to create an attractive-looking hangar than to produce a multi-billion pound terminal that is acclaimed as an architectural masterpiece.
“With hangars you are much more constricted by the envelope of the building, but you can prevent it from looking like a shed by treating it as a giant sculpture,” he remarks. “An attractive look depends on how you design the roof, how you choose the materials and the articulation of the external details. With the Cardiff hangar, we broke down the impact of its size by sculpturing the façade with overhangs and emphasising some of the features, such as the columns around the perimeter. We also exposed steelwork on the roof to create shadow and texture to break up the mass of the building.”
Opening all the right doors
When working on a hangar, Arup’s team produces the outer shell, but then calls on a specialist manufacturer to provide the doors. Arup often teams up with Jewers Doors, which is the world’s largest high-end manufacturer of hangar doors. The company’s massive sliding doors for A380 hangars can be seen all over the world. Recent examples were installed at airports in Dubai, Oman and Kuwait.
The company’s largest ever contract was for New Doha International Airport, agreed in 2011. Jewers Doors had to design a range of different doors to fit various spaces. Type 126 doors were fitted in three-bay Emiri Hangar A, as well as the four-bay Emiri Hangar B. But the biggest challenge was to provide the massive doors for a much larger aircraft maintenance hangar, built to accommodate Qatar Airways’ future fleet of A380 aircraft.
This maintenance hangar has one opening 178.74m wide and another opening which is 218.74m wide – both of which are 27.55m high. The unique appearance of the doors is the result of using Kingspan composite panel cladding, which are aluminium skins with more than 3,500 bespoke integrated view windows.
Luke, who regularly makes use of Jewers Doors products, says that the architects can play around with them to produce the look they want. “We could ask for doors with horizontal glass so we can look into the hangar, or we could ask for doors which are fully glazed up to the roof, or we could have doors with strips of glazing in. And there are different types of glazing – it could be polycarbonate glazing which gives you a translucent capacity but doesn’t let bright sunshine in. They might be double glazed, or single glazed.
“The choice of materials can be dictated by whether the doors are facing north or south. If the doors face south, you don’t want the sun blasting in as you can’t really work, but if they face north you want the doors to let the softer northern light into the hangar. Like everything else in hangar design, door choice is a balance between functionality, economics and aesthetics,” he comments.
Jonathan Jewers says that the company’s approach to hangar design has been influenced by the need to be more ‘green’. “In recent years, thermal performance has become one of the three biggest influences on our designs. Our new doors have much better thermal insulation and much lower air leakage. The other major influence on modern design is light – we want a certain amount of natural daylight to enter, which has a massive bearing on their architecture. The third factor is improving their acoustics so that the noisy environment of the hangars is more enclosed,” he says.
‘Once-in-a-lifetime’
Recently, Jewers Doors provided new tail-slot doors for Arup’s ambitious project to update two British Airways maintenance hangars at Heathrow, in order to allow them to house new A380s. Luke was the mastermind behind this massive “once-in-a-lifetime” project to lift the roof on the Heathrow hangars, which were built in the early 1950s and gained grade II listed status from English Heritage in 1995. At nearly 23m high, the two hangars could easily accommodate the B747, but with the arrival of 12 A380s from 2013 their entrances needed to be raised by another 3.5m to accommodate the new aircraft’s larger tail fin.
The redevelopment involved the introduction of 138 tonnes of additional steel and strengthening to create a new ‘eye brow’ truss to form the remodelled opening. The single largest piece of steel reinforcement – the ‘eye’ piece – weighs 24 tonnes. Over 30,000 welding rods weighing approximately 1.5 tonnes were used to create over 4km of linear welds.
Luke informs: “I decided that the best option to accommodate the A380 aircraft in these 60-year-old hangars was to cut a slot in the 120m span roof. It was a massively complex operation and created a lot of logistical problems, but we achieved it. This kind of renovation is more and more common as the scale of new aircraft dwarfs the existing hangar space.”
It’s not always practical to raise the roof and many hub airports simply decide to build new ones. Whether they are maintenance, or paint, or casualty hangars, the major airports want them to look good and the ‘sculptural’ approach that Luke helped to pioneer is now common in the newer airport hangars worldwide. He particularly admires the Lufthansa hangars in Frankfurt and Munich, the Emirates Airline hangars in Dubai and the Royal Fleet facilities, also in Dubai.
One of Arup’s major rivals as a hangar designer is the French company ADPI, based at Orly, Paris. They used the same ‘sculptural approach’ on one of the world‘s largest buildings, the aforementioned 500m long and 45m high Qatar Airlines hangar, at New Doha International Airport, for which Jewers Doors provided the doors. The hangar is large enough to accommodate over 20 narrow and wide-bodied aircraft. Arup acted as peer reviewers on the project.
The sophisticated approach to hangar design is not, however, for everyone. Smaller airports, in particular, may be more focused on cost than aesthetics. For these customers, the British contractor REIDsteel provides a cheaper option. It offers a bespoke service which involves designing, manufacturing and erecting hangars using the company’s patented steel frames. REIDsteel also builds its own hangar doors, as well as cranes to fit the gigantic spaces.
Although the REIDsteel hangars are rarely in demand at major airport hubs, they have been installed at many smaller airports. In recent times, for example, REIDsteel has built hangars at Mongolia’s Ulan Bator airport, Equatorial New Guinea’s Malabo Airport, and Oyo Ollombo Airport in Congo. The company is also just completing a large hangar extension in Malta.
Rollo Reid, director of REIDsteel, notes: “With our concept, we can provide the designs and a price for an A380 hangar anywhere in the world within 20 minutes of being contacted. We quickly send out the foundation layouts and it’s erected in six or seven months. The hangars might need to be adapted to extreme weather conditions. We are doing one in Mauritius which must withstand 250mph load winds. The Ulan Bator one has to deal with temperatures of minus 40. The snow and ice in Russia can also be a factor.”
Reid says the way the company constructs hangars has changed little since it began producing them in 1920. “We have a nice advert from 1926 and the main difference was they were only 12m in span and 3m high and 12m long. The steel frames and doors haven’t changed much, but the scale has changed enormously. Up until five years ago, the gold standard for hangars was determined by the Boeing 747 – they had to be 80m by 80m by 21m high. Then came the A380, which was 24.5m high and wider and longer so the gold standard is now 92m by 92m by 26m high,” he remarks.
