As I close my eyes and lean back against my towel-covered lounge chair, my toes digging into soft, white sand and my senses calmed by the sound of the waterfall splashing into the lagoon next to me, I have to work hard to convince myself that I am not, in fact, somewhere in Hawaii or Bora Bora. It helps if I open my eyes, of course, because then I can see, through the green fronds of the palm, banana and papaya trees surrounding me, the arching rooftop and grand, segmented doors of what is, inarguably, an aircraft hangar. An airship hangar, to be exact … and, to be even more precise, reportedly the largest clear-span hangar in the world, stretching more than 1,000 feet long, 320 feet high, and encompassing 5.2 million cubic meters of space.
If I actually make the effort to sit up and look out the windows in the lower portion of the hangar walls, I can also see that it is far from tropical on the outside of this mini-ecosystem. Snow is blowing past the windows in horizontal, billowing clouds, and the parking lot is covered in ice. If I really want to test my bizarro-meter, I can peer even more closely out those windows and make out, across the airfield, empty MiG bunkers covered in turf and snow.
This particular aircraft-hangar-turned-tropical-island, you see, is located on an ex-military airfield of the former East German Republic in Brand, Germany, just east of Berlin. Exactly how I found myself in a blimp hangar east of Berlin in the middle of winter is a whole 'nother story. But sitting next to my lagoon, Pina Colada in hand, two thoughts cross my mind. The first is that while I've seen hangars with hot tubs, bars, and even sand on the floors, this is an entirely new level of hangar experience for me. Not only have I gone walking on a beach and through a one km-long tropical rainforest path here, I've even had the chance to go flying of a sort, in a tethered helium balloon at one end of the hall. And while I've spent more than a few nights in a wide variety of hangars and hangar/homes that ranged from glitzy and luxurious to bitterly cold and uncomfortable, sleeping in a beach-tent home next to an African village in a hangar … well, that's a new one for me.
The second thought that registers, however, is that if this building were just a rectangular structure of equal size that had never housed a ship of the air, it wouldn't hold even half the same appeal for me. For as I sit and gaze across the rainforest in the middle of the hangar floor, I can still see, without even having been here when the event occurred, the Skyship 600 that once flew in here-in circles, my friend Edwin says with a remembered laugh, because of the air currents that swirled through the hangar when the gigantic end doors were opened to the outside wind. As Edwin tells the story, the airship materializes again in front of me-a 200-foot-long blimp, turning slow circles above the hangar floor, still dwarfed, somehow, by the size of its home.
Perhaps Edwin, his friend Matt and I are the only three people in this hangar who can still see the blimp lingering over the palm trees. It's too bad. For just as it's the people residing there who turn a mere house into a home filled with meaning, memories, warmth and life, it is the aircraft that have taken shelter within a hangar that turn it from a mere structure into someplace far more special, imbued with a mystical aura of adventures remembered and possibilities yet to come. And that is true whether the hangar in question is a towering dome capable of housing an entire tropical island, or the smallest wooden T-hangar providing shelter to a simple, timeworn Taylorcraft tucked away between drafty walls.
I have spent more than my fair share of time in all shapes and sizes of hangars, from pristine showplaces to clutter-monkey treasure troves, and I can't say as I have a favorite, although I have a collection of cherished memories from all sorts of different sources. There was, for example, the hangar in southern Indiana where I once spent a memorable date night-until 5:00 in the morning, mind you-painting an airplane. What can I say? I was young. But I still remember scooping up a mix of water and overspray from the pristine hangar floor with an industrial-sized squeegee at about 4:30 a.m., as I commented wryly to my date that he sure knew how to show a girl a good time. And yet, strange as it might seem, the memory still makes me smile, because he and I weren't just painting a tractor or cleaning the garage. We were readying a ship of the air for adventures that were already taking flight in our minds.
Then, too, there were the two small hangars at Cable Airport in Upland, California, filled with priceless aviation memorabilia, including the tower departure logs from the first women's transcontinental air race in 1929, and occupied by a wonderful retired airline pilot who shared my name. I flipped through a rack of black-and-white photos there for quite some time one day, stunned to find each of them signed by aviation luminaries from the 1930s and '40s … and addressed "To Lane."
