A hangar is a closed building structure to hold aircraft, spacecraft or tanks in protective storage. Most hangars are built of metal, but other materials such as wood and concrete are also used. The word hangar comes from Middle French hanghart ("enclosure near a house"), of Germanic origin, from Frankish *haimgard ("home-enclosure", "fence around a group of houses"), from *haim ("home, village, hamlet") + gard ("yard").
Hangars are used for: protection from the weather, protection from direct sunlight, maintenance, repair, manufacture, assembly and storage of aircraft on airfields, aircraft carriers and ships.
The Wright brothers stored and repaired their aircraft in a wooden hangar constructed in 1902 at Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina for their glider. After completing design and construction of the Wright Flyer in Ohio, the brothers returned to Kill Devil Hill only to find their hangar damaged. They repaired the structure and constructed a new workshop while they waited for the Flyer to be shipped.
Carl Richard Nyberg used a hangar to store his 1908 Flugan (fly) in the early 20th century.
In 1909, Louis Bleriot crash-landed on a northern French farm in Les Baraques (between Sangatte and Calais) and rolled his monoplane into the farmer's cattle pen. At the time, Bleriot was in a race to be the first man to cross the English Channel in a heavier-than-air aircraft, so he set up his headquarters in the unused shed.