This design looks a lot like what we have had at Sunflower Gliderport
for just over 30 years. Except ours has 10 rolling doors on each
side. Roughly 200 feet long, and 40 feet deep. Currently has 1-26,
IS-29 Lark, HP-14, 2-33, and G-103 on one side, empty space where a
Woodstock lived, 2-22, C-182 (Towplane), empty space where Slingsby
Swallow will soon return, 16.5 meter Diamant, and another G-103 on the
other side. Total of 11 planes.

Would be tought to fit an Eta in with all the panels on, but other
that...

We keep the wing on the ground with an old tire or similar thing.
Padding at the option of the owner. It is also tall enough we could
hoist another over some of the less tall gliders. It actually tall
enough for a Cessna 310 with a flat nose strut, I think. Somewhere
around 13 to 14 foot high doors.

When it was built, we could lock it. Trouble is, as it seems with any
club, someone will show up to fly and not have their key. It goes
down hil from there. Just like the storage cabinet we made. Put a
lock on it. Even wrote the combo on the back of the box in pencil.
The instructor came up, needed into the box, so he "openned the box
without removing the lock".

A couple of recommendations for you. It is a long ways from the
upright of the truss to the outside of the roof. Suggest you put
cables and over center boomers to tie the edge of the roof to the
ground. Done on both sides, the roof will no longer flex in the wind.
This is a simple affair, of two cable loops. One attached to the
roof, the other attached to the ground. Use the boomer/latch/hasp to
connect the cables and apply tension. Recommend one at every truss,
except of course, for the end walls. Teach everyone to set the latch
on the ground when they remove it, so it cannot ding the wing of the
sailplane being removed. Might want to make the upper cable loops
shorter so they will not hang down hear the wings.

Put a vertical post hanging down from the roof, just inside of the
doors, every 1/3 of a door span. This way, if the roof does flex in a
wind storm, the doors cannot fall in on the sailplanes they are
protecting. We learned all these lessons the hard way. Our doors
roll on tracks on the ground and have a simple pin going into a
c-channel at the top.

My favorite scary memory of this hangar was watching a door just fall
outward, right next to a glider. The door was being moved, and all
the top pins fell out. The door was claer of the glider, and just
made a lot of wind and dust fly. We propped the door back up, put in
new pins, put the glider away for the evening, and went on our way.

A beautiful design and a great way to store sailplane.

Steve Leonard
Wichita, KS