Hangar Flyin'

Back in the early 80's I had this Cher OH kee 140 which I had bought for $6k. I was on a low budget and I was running auto fuel and had basically no radios. I had a hangar at this really minimal yet convenient public airport called Suburban. More stories about Suburban later. This hangar had belonged to a guy with a little homebuilt. This T Hangar came with no doors like many there at Suburban . What the previous tenant had done was simply build a huge plywood wall across the area where a door would be. He then had these small hinged doors, four of them, to be openings for the fuselage and wings of his tiny little homebuilt. It was pretty slick, but it didn't work for my PA-28. For a long time I just parked the plane in front of the hangar and tied it down. Later I adapted a way to get the tail in the main doors and left the plane part way in. I was told by the airport management to "do something about your hangar". The Altmans who ran the airport were very good and patient people, and the Suburban Airport atmosphere was like family. One nice autumn day I decided to get my plane in the hangar for the winter. I went to the lumber store(this is before Home Depot) and bought a circular saw, an extension cord, a hammer, and one of those big carpenter pencils, and a tape measure. I went back to the airport and started hacking away at that door and basically just enlarged the old tiny-airplane opening into something that my plane would exactly fit through. It looked like a billboard a plane had flown through in a cartoon. I put the plane in. I never did build and install doors for the opening like the other tenant had. I just left the crazy cut-out and everybody knew my hangar. I was on the waiting list there for an "end hangar" for a long time. One day when I least expected it, Debbie said "Hey Lou, you still want an end hangar?". That was one of the best days of my young life. It was like I had won the lottery. I tried to explain my good fortune to my non-flying friends, but they just didn't get it. This is big, so big , I told them. "I see Lloyd, you're renting a hangar and now you're moving to a better one. Yes that 's nice. You have a Piper Cub, don't you"? With an end hangar one has an extra room sort of, because the hangar is accidentally larger. Some guys put a couch and TV and stereo there. Some guys put a workshop, or a little machine shop. A hobby car. A poker table for a once a week regular game. I could write a whole post about end hangars. Actually some of the most extravagant hangars I've seen are not even end hangars, just T's. But I knew what I wanted. A little kind of club house to party in, spend the night if I wanted, hang out, a pilot's lounge. But Peter Pan was aging and he couldn't stop his whiskers. By the time I could get the floor done and start dry walling I had moved on to finding my own place in the sun on Delmarva. Now thirty years later with my own half mile of turf to land on and hangar to go with it, I see that I have partitioned off a 20 X 12 little "room" in the hangar. It's the club house I never did grow out of. G.A. Informal.