Airship Hangar - History - Early Hangars

Early Hangars

The first real airship hangar was built as Hangar “Y” at Chalais Meudon near Paris in 1879 where the engineers Charles Renard and Arthur Constantin Krebs constructed their first airship “La France”. Hangar “Y” is one of the few remaining hangars in Europe.

The construction of the first operational rigid airship LZ1 by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin started in 1899 in a floating hangar on Lake Constance at Manzell today part of Friedrichshafen. The floating hangar turned into the direction of the wind on its own and so it was easier to move the airship into the hangar exactly against the wind.

For the same reason later rotating hangars were built at Biesdorf (today part of Berlin) and at the Nordholz Airbase, to the south of Cuxhaven in Germany. Already before the First World War there were transportable tent constructions as hangars for smaller airships. They were quite common in the US at fairgrounds or exhibitions. The American Melvin Vaniman constructed big tent hangars in France particularly for the French army.

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