WIX Archives
Re: Cool Hangars
Posted by Steve T on Sun Dec 28, 2003 08:59:22 PM
In reply top Cool Hangars posted by Dan Linn on Sun Dec 28, 2003 02:22:59 PM
Dan--
Museum collections up here in Canada with architecturally nifty digs would include the CAvM and CWH quarters, and I'd also cite the Western Development Museum aviation galleries in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, both of which incorporate partial hangar fronts and aircraft murals as backdrops on the INSIDE walls.
The cleanest museum hangar I've ever been in was the one at Kalamazoo; one could have picnicked on the floor and this was in the days when the collection was still very much active on the circuit. There was (at that time) nothing special about the building itself, but its spotless condition set it apart.
Atmosphere? Shuttleworth. I still remember looking through a doorway at the side of their WWI display, with its soft yellowish incandescent lighting, and seeing in perfect profile view the world's only flyable Gladiator beyond the door in pale grey skylight in the next bay. Positively eerie.
Not museums, but just neat and maybe a little spooky: The "C-46" hangar at Mahon-Wrinkle Airpark (old Webb AFB, Big Spring TX). A C-46 is big, all right, but this monster arch-roofed hangar simply dwarfs it (the whole airport was rather like that, being a small GA airport on gigantic ex-USAF premises). And the main hangar at Cut Bank, Montana. I would love to have seen this at twilight: a towering Art Deco-ish structure, except for an oddly undersized garage-type door taking the place of the original big hangar units this looked like a phantom from a 1930s "Flying The Mail" film epic. (Inside at the time among the modern light stuff, a lovely old Stinson SR and Neil McClain's T2V SeaStar N447TV--adding to the surreality of the place).
Thanx for an interesting post!
S.