With its back to the coastal mountains of Oregon, the world’s largest free span wooden hangar sleeps like a giant on green grass under a rusty blanket of tin. Known as NAS Tillamook Hangar B, it is the sole survivor of the 17 wooden hangars the U.S. Navy built on the West Coast in 1942 to protect K-class blimps when they weren’t flying anti-submarine missions. On closer reflection, its past suggested the future of aviation.
Its alphabetical predecessor, Hangar A, was built second, in 27 working days, in 1943. What makes this feat remarkable is the hangar’s size: 1,072 feet long, 296 feet wide, and 192 feet high. It covers more than seven acres, and each hangar held up to a half-dozen K-ships, which were 252 feet long and 80 feet in diameter. At each end, concrete stanchions support the 120-foot-high six-section doors that moved on railroad tracks to a 220-foot wide yawn.
The stanchions and the concrete footers for the wooden arches that supported the tarpaper and tin roofed structure are all that remain of Hangar A. It burned in 1992. To offset some of hangar’s $20,000 monthly upkeep, it rented some of its seven acres as storage, and it was 7,600 tons of straw awaiting shipment to Japan that caught fire. The straw, worth about $200,000, was insured. The hangar, owned by the Port of Tillamook Bay, was not.
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