Necessity is the mother of invention, and nowhere is this clearer than in the world of temporary aircraft hangar buildings, which amongst the world of robust temporary steel buildings are the ones that have had to adapt to the needs of the industry more than perhaps any other building.
The first half of the 20th century, in particular, saw a figurative and literal expansion in the size and quantity of hangars, largely the result of the rise and fall of the airship.
However, one of the most critical periods for hangars in the United Kingdom was during what is known as the Expansion Period from 1932 until 1941, where a huge number of airfields and their related infrastructure were created exceptionally quickly.
Because of the need to have huge, robust buildings constructed very quickly, the Expansion Period saw a fundamental shift in the design of hangars towards temporary and semi-permanent structures that became the largest construction programme in the history of Britain.
The United Aircraft Carrier
The RAF was founded at the tail end of the First World War as an amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, in response to the role aircraft had played in the conflict.
However, within months its numbers had been cut dramatically after Armistice Day from being the most powerful air force in the world with the infrastructure to match. Instead, the RAF was reduced from around 300,000 personnel in 1918 to just over 35,000 a year later.
This would be how the Air Force was managed for a decade, and that showed in the types of deployment infrastructure they would have. The priorities for hangar construction were often smaller in scale and more permanent, whilst larger hangars were exclusively for airships.
At one point the RAF was potentially seen as surplus to requirements and in 1923 had just 371 first-line aircraft. It would maintain parity with the French Air Force but the focus was on consolidation.
The situation would reverse dramatically in the 1930s. First, the crash of the R101 ended zeppelin production in the UK, and similar large-scale accidents in the United States and Germany ended the airship age forever.
The other major change was that whilst the RAF’s downsizing was predicated in 1919 based on the idea that there would be no major conflicts for at least a decade, by 1932 there were already concerns that Germany was planning to break its treaty restrictions of arms and rebuild its Luftwaffe.
This led to an unprecedented decade of construction of hangar infrastructure in the UK, to the point that specialist journal The Aeroplane described the country as “one vast aircraft carrier”, with over 9,000 miles of runways and one million prefabricated buildings.
The vast majority of these were part of the five approved schemes passed by the Cabinet, with four others being rejected before the formal submission stage.
The key to the success of these was prefabrication; the scheme designs were uniform by design to ensure familiarity as well as lower timescales and, to a degree, costs.
By the Second World War, these buildings changed from brick to concrete and finally to all-steel buildings, shaping the design and appearance of aircraft hangers from then until the present day.
Comentários