Where Was The First Aircraft Hangar Located?

Form follows function in the construction of aircraft hangar buildings, particularly temporary structures which need to be robust, built quickly and easy to take down.

Until the rise of consistent air travel, every hangar was constructed under the same principle; it was a large enough shelter to keep the aeroplane and any necessary tools away from the elements.

Because of this, a lot of people cite the hangar constructed by the Wright Brothers out of wood as the first one ever made. 

Whilst it is the first aeroplane hanger, a much larger, more expensive and ambitious shelter had already been constructed across the Atlantic Ocean in a bid to win a prize worth over a million pounds today.

From A Field In West Paris

In the late 19th century, the early aeronautics world was focused on attempting to master controlled lighter-than-air flight rather than make attempts at what was seen at the time as the impossible.

The centre of this was the Aero-Club (later the Aero-Club de France), founded in 1898 by a collective of aeronautical pioneers, patrons, sponsors and enthusiasts.

One of the founders was Jules Verne, most famous for the 1872 novel Around the World in Eighty Days but an early aviation enthusiast who would as early as his first novel discuss the possibility of flying to Africa in a hot-air balloon.

However, there were two particularly important figures in the history of the hangar as we know it today.

The first was Alberto Santos-Dumont, who constructed it at the Aero-Club’s home at the Parc de Saint-Cloud in West Paris in order to build and store his groundbreaking airship experiments.

The other was Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, the benefactor who funded the grand prize at the end that Mr Santos-Dumont strove for.

Around The Eiffel In Thirty Minutes

The Deutsch de la Meurthe prize was one of the earliest and most prestigious in the pioneering era before the Wright Flyer.

It offered 100,000 francs (£12,000 at the time, worth over £1.25m now) to the first person or team who could travel from Saint-Cloud, circle the Eiffel Tower and return to the start point within half an hour without stopping.

Mr Santos-Dumont was already particularly influential in the field of aeronautics development, having developed the first internal combustion engine capable of controlling and directing the airship.

Following the successful take-off and landing of No. 3 on 13th November, he commissioned the construction of a large hangar that was 30 metres long, 11 metres high and seven metres wide. 

These dimensions were sufficient to store the airship when filled with hydrogen gas, as well as the equipment needed to produce the hydrogen gas he needed for subsequent attempts.

The Home Of History

This hangar would store his multiple attempts to claim the Deutsch prize, most infamously Airship No.5, which whilst photographed circling the Eiffel Tower crashed into a Hotel.

His next attempt, on 19th October 1901, would make it with just thirty seconds to spare, although due to the fact that he technically only landed 40 seconds after the time had expired, it took two weeks for this to be declared.

The hangar that housed this achievement has long since been dismantled, but as Mr Santos-Dumont spread the airship around the world, so too did the hangar building.