Aircraft Hangar Design Checklist: What Your Engineer Needs Before Concept Design

You don’t need to have your aircraft hangar designed before you talk to us. That’s what the concept stage is for.

You might already have an aircraft, a site and a clear idea of what you want. Or you might be much earlier in the process and need help working out the building size, door opening, site layout or who else needs to be involved.

Either is a good place to start.

There are a few things we’ll want to understand as we develop your concept: your aircraft, how you plan to use the hangar, what we know about the site and what the building may need to accommodate in the future.

If you already have that information, great. If you don’t, we can work through it with you.

This checklist explains the questions we’ll consider and why they matter.

1. What Aircraft Are We Designing Around?

The aircraft is our starting point.

For each aircraft, we want to establish:

Make and model
Wingspan
Overall length
Tail height
Number of aircraft
Any realistic future aircraft requirements

Where possible, we’ll work from manufacturer specifications rather than approximate measurements.

The difference between aircraft can be substantial. A Cessna Skyhawk has a wingspan of approximately 11 m, while a Beechcraft King Air 360 has a wingspan of approximately 17.65 m.

Those measurements give us a starting point, but they don’t give us the hangar dimensions.

We also need to consider how much room you want around the aircraft, how it will move through the building and what else needs to happen inside.

If there’s a realistic chance you’ll move to a larger aircraft later, it’s worth discussing now. That doesn’t necessarily mean building a larger hangar. Sometimes it’s simply about making decisions that leave you with options.

2. What Do You Need to Do Inside the Hangar?

A hangar designed primarily for aircraft storage can look quite different from one used for maintenance or a commercial aviation operation.

We’ll want to understand whether your building needs to accommodate:

Aircraft storage
Maintenance
Workshop areas
Parts or equipment storage
Offices
Staff amenities
Training or meeting areas
Vehicles
Other operational requirements

This helps us think beyond the aircraft envelope and understand how much usable space you actually need.

It can also affect building compliance. The National Construction Code groups buildings according to their use, and different parts of the same building can be classified differently.

You don’t need to determine that classification yourself. What matters at concept stage is giving us a clear picture of how you intend to use the building so the appropriate specialists can confirm the requirements that apply.

3. How Much Space Do You Need Around the Aircraft?

Wingspan alone isn’t enough to determine your hangar width.

Think about what happens once the aircraft is inside.

Do you need to walk around it comfortably? Open aircraft doors? Carry out maintenance? Move equipment past the wing? Store tools or parts along the walls?

For multiple aircraft, we also need to understand how they’re going to sit together.

Will they be side-by-side or nose-to-tail? Can wings overlap? Does each aircraft need independent access, or are you comfortable moving one aircraft to reach another?

There isn’t one clearance or layout that works for every hangar. The useful question is how you want to operate.

Our Hunter Valley Gliding Club aircraft hangar in Singleton is a good example.

The club needed to accommodate gliders and tow aircraft while maintaining easy access to individual aircraft. The resulting building was 15 m wide by 60 m long, with large openings along both long sides.

Instead of starting with a standard hangar and trying to fit the operation inside it, the way the club used its aircraft helped shape the building.

4. What Clear Door Opening Do You Need?

Once we understand the aircraft and how you plan to move it, we can start looking at the hangar opening.

The key dimensions are the usable clear width and clear height available to the aircraft.

We’ll consider:

Aircraft wingspan and tail height
The clearance you want around the aircraft
How the aircraft approaches the building
Whether it will be taxied or towed
The door system
How the opening interacts with the building structure

A large hangar door isn’t simply an item added to the end of the design. The opening can have a significant influence on the structure around it, particularly as spans and opening widths increase.

That’s why we prefer to consider the building and door together during concept development.

For more detailed information about large aviation door systems, our sister company OpenX Doors specialises in engineered door solutions for large openings.

5. How Will the Aircraft Get to the Hangar?

A hangar can have plenty of internal space and still be difficult to use if the aircraft movement outside hasn’t been considered.

We need to look beyond the building footprint and understand the relationship between the hangar, apron and taxiway or taxilane.

That can include:

Aircraft approach to the door
Turning and manoeuvring
Towing
Apron space
Nearby buildings
Fences and gates
Light poles
Vehicle movements

CASA’s apron safety guidance identifies collision risk between aircraft, vehicles and obstacles, safe aircraft entry and egress, and the management of vehicles and equipment as important considerations in apron operations.

CASA Apron Safety Management guidance

The exact requirements depend on the aircraft, site and aerodrome, so we don’t apply one generic clearance figure to every project.

Instead, we want to understand how your aircraft actually needs to move.

6. What Do We Know About the Site?

If you’ve identified a site, the next step is understanding what we’re working with.

Useful information can include:

Site address and property details
Survey or site plan
Airport lease plan
Site levels
Existing buildings
Taxiway or taxilane location
Existing apron
Vehicle access
Services
Easements
Known planning or airport restrictions

For an airport site, information from the airport operator can be particularly useful. Lease boundaries, development guidelines, building setbacks, security requirements and future airport plans can all influence where the hangar can sit.

If you’re still deciding where to position the building, our article; Site Planning and Airport Considerations looks at this stage in more detail.

7. Are There Any Height or Airspace Constraints?

Aircraft tail height and the required door opening help determine how high your hangar needs to be.

At some airport locations, we also need to establish whether there are constraints on how high it can be.

The Australian Government’s National Airports Safeguarding Framework provides national guidance for planning and development around airports. This includes development that could affect operational airspace.

Guideline F specifically deals with intrusions into protected airspace, including Obstacle Limitation Surfaces and PANS-OPS surfaces.

This creates an important relationship between aircraft height, clear door opening, structural depth and overall building height.

If a height restriction applies to your site, it’s much better to establish it while the hangar is still a concept.

8. What Site Information Could Affect the Building?

The building also needs to work with what’s happening underneath and around it.

Two areas worth identifying early are ground conditions and drainage.

If a geotechnical report already exists, it can provide useful information for foundation design. If it doesn’t, geotechnical investigation may be something the project team recommends as the design progresses.

Drainage is another consideration, particularly with a large roof area.

One millimetre of rain falling on one square metre of roof represents approximately one litre of water. On a 2,000 m² hangar, 50 mm of rain represents around 100,000 litres falling on the roof.

That isn’t a stormwater design calculation, but it shows the scale you’re dealing with.

Site levels, roofwater, apron drainage, overland flow and stormwater discharge may all need civil engineering input, so they’re worth considering alongside the building rather than after its position and floor level have been locked in.

9. Where Are You Up to With Approvals?

You don’t necessarily need approvals in place before concept design begins.

In many cases, some level of concept information is needed before the approval process can progress.

What helps is understanding what’s already been confirmed.

Depending on the project, that could involve conversations with the airport operator, council, town planner, building certifier, civil engineer, fire consultant or aviation specialist.

Not every project will need every consultant.

Our Aircraft Hangar Approvals in Australia: What Do You Need Before You Build? guide explains the different approval considerations in more detail.

For certified aerodromes, CASA’s Part 139 framework covers aerodrome facilities and operations, but the requirements applying to an individual hangar project will depend on the aerodrome and circumstances.

10. What Else Needs to Be Part of the Building?

This is where we look beyond the main hangar space.

You might need:

Offices
Bathrooms and staff amenities
Workshop areas
Parts or equipment storage
Power and lighting
Water
Communications
Security
Compressed air
Solar
Rainwater storage
Other specialist services

Knowing about these requirements early helps us develop a building that works as a whole.

Our commercial aircraft hangar at Cessnock Airport incorporated a 27 m clear-span hangar alongside office and amenities space, fire separation, capacity for rooftop solar and a high-clearance door system.

The building needed to respond to all of those requirements, not just the aircraft dimensions.

11. What Might Change in the Future?

Finally, think about what you could realistically need from the site in five or ten years.

That might be a larger aircraft, another aircraft, more apron, additional workshop space or another hangar.

You don’t need to build all of that now.

But knowing what’s reasonably likely can help us think about where the building sits, how it could expand and whether today’s decisions unnecessarily limit tomorrow’s options.

What We’ll Work Through With You

You don’t need to arrive at your first conversation with every item below resolved.

Think of this as the information we’ll gradually bring together as the concept develops.

Area	What we’ll consider
Aircraft	Current aircraft dimensions and realistic future requirements
Operation	What you need to do inside the hangar
Layout	Aircraft position, clearance and movement
Door	Required clear opening and aircraft approach
Site	Available space, levels, access and existing infrastructure
Airside access	Taxiway, apron, manoeuvring and towing
Airport	Operator, lease and development requirements
Airspace	Any height or protected-airspace constraints
Ground and drainage	Geotechnical and civil information
Approvals	What’s known and what still needs to be confirmed
Other spaces	Offices, amenities, workshops and storage
Services	Power, water and other operational requirements
Future	Possible aircraft, building or site expansion

Starting Your Aircraft Hangar Concept

You don’t need a finished brief to start a conversation with TechSpan.

At the Concept stage of our 3C Advantage, we start with what you already know: your aircraft, your site if you have one, how you want to use the hangar and what you’re hoping to achieve.

From there, we can help identify the questions that still need answering and where input from other specialists is required.

Once those requirements are clearer, we can configure the structural solution around them before moving through to Construct.

The aim isn’t for you to design the hangar before you come to us. It’s to develop the right building by asking the right questions early.

Explore our aircraft hangar solutions and broader aviation building experience, or talk to the TechSpan team about your aircraft hangar.