Carousel hangar

John-

Every situation is different, and while I agree that long fully doored hangars with full taxiway access on both sides are simple and offer their own advantages for glider storage, I still recommend a carousel as an equally viable option in some cases. What if you cannot access both sides of the hangar due to other hangars backing up to yours? If you only have one access point, a long skinny hangar with two sets of full length doors is not feasible. If your hangar lot will only support a square hangar with one-sided access, I maintain that the carousel will maximize storage and convenience.

I have measured and compared the carousel concept against a number of other designs, including the Portmoak and Omarama hangars (as well as our own Albuquerque Soaring Club hangar at Moriarty) and have roughly concluded that the space required for eight fully assembled sailplanes is slightly less in a square hangar with a carousel than in a "T-hangar" tail-to-tail, wings overlapping format like Omarama. Remember that the nose out positioning means that the T-tails are relatively close together at the center of the "pizza" and the wingtips do, in fact overlap.

While I was contemplating building commercially available (rental) sailplane hangars at a number of popular soaring sites, I did some exhaustive analyses of the build costs vs. potential income and concluded that, unless every spot was occupied fully and year-round, you were probably going to lose money.

However, the carousel concept was better on a dollar to square foot build, due to the more efficient footprint (square vs. rectangle) and the requirement for only one door and one taxiway access point, which could be extremely narrow as all gliders would exit on the same axis path. In addition, the costs of providing full length doors and full length access on two sides raised the build cost to well above the cost of the carousel and its installation. To be sure, I had planned on doing the carousel fabrication and installation myself, but the point is still valid.

I agree that every hangar could probably fit more aircraft with "efficient" stacking, but the primary reason people like keeping a glider in a hangar is ease of access. If it takes longer and requires more people to unstack a hangar to get your glider out than it takes to assemble it from the trailer, assembly and disassembly is probably the way to go.

PS, I also manufacture the "WingrRigger (tm), so I am an advocate of other alternatives as well.

I am excited to hear your thoughts on a carousel hanger.
I have seen two of them.
I loved them because one person could safely move a glider in and out withouth doing the "hanger ballet."
I was going to build one at Minden but the soaring situation has never settled into stable situation.
Keep us updated!