# Aircraft Hangar Construction | Slab, Door & Roof **URL:** https://utsbuildpros.com/blog/aircraft-hangar-metal-building-slab-door-texas **Summary:** A metal hangar is simple to frame. The concrete slab under the aircraft and the door decide the job. How we plan, pour and warranty both in Texas. **Overview:** UTS BuildPros General Manager Josh Lawrence explains that a clear-span metal aircraft hangar is simpler to frame than the SCADA-equipped O M facilities the company has built at four Permian Basin energy sites, and that hangars are decided by the slab and the door. Slabs are engineered from the heaviest aircraft's wheel loads and tire pressure under ACI 360R; IBC Section 412.3 requires floors graded and drained through an oil separator; bi-fold and hydraulic doors load the frame while sliding doors load the slab; NFPA 409 groups set fire protection. Lawrence has completed two ACI University concrete certificate programs and holds MBCI's standing seam roof installation certification, which MBCI requires for its Standard III and Single Source weathertightness warranties. --- Metal Buildings 9 min read 2026-09-18 # Building an Aircraft Hangar: Why the Slab and the Door Decide the Job Josh Lawrence General Manager [jlawrence@utsbuildpros.com](mailto:jlawrence@utsbuildpros.com) | [719-924-2418](tel:7199242418) Share In This Article - Why a Hangar Is the Simpler Building - The Floor Carries the Aircraft - Where the Concrete Knowledge Comes In - The Door Is a Structural Decision - Fire Protection Depends on the Hangar Group - The Roof Over It - One Contractor for the Whole Building A clear-span metal hangar is, structurally, one of the more straightforward buildings we get asked to put up. There is no control room to fit out, no pump house, no run of offices. It is a large open building with a very large opening in one wall. That is exactly why hangars go wrong in the two places that are not simple: the concrete floor the aircraft sits on and the door it rolls out through. Get those right and the rest is a metal building, which is work we do every week. We are now being asked to build hangars, so I want to set out plainly how we approach them, and why the mix of qualifications behind that approach is unusual to find in one general contractor. ## Why a Hangar Is the Simpler Building Our recent metal building work in the Permian Basin has been operations and maintenance facilities for energy operators. One floor plan, built at four sites for three operators: south of Midland for WHC Energy Services on a Chevron project, two locations in Culberson County for Delaware Ranch Solar, and one for Greater Bryant G Solar in Midland County. Each has a full SCADA control room, offices, a restroom, maintenance bays and a separate pump house, finished under a standing-seam roof on a caliche pad a long way from the nearest supply house. The details are on our [energy and O&M facilities page](https://utsbuildpros.com/services/metal-buildings/energy-om-facilities). A SCADA room is the reason those buildings exist. It carries the monitoring and control for a solar field or a production site, so it has to be powered, conditioned and finished to a standard a bare shell never sees, and it has to work the day the operator moves in. A hangar has far fewer trades inside it. Its difficulty is not spread across the building; it is concentrated in the floor and the door. ## The Floor Carries the Aircraft A warehouse floor is designed mostly around forklifts and racking. A hangar floor is designed around aircraft, and aircraft put their weight down through a few tires at high pressure. The contact area of a tire is roughly the wheel load divided by the inflation pressure, so a higher tire pressure puts the same weight on a smaller patch of concrete. That concentrated load is what the slab has to carry. It is not the only load. Aircraft get jacked at jacking points during maintenance, tugs and lifts move across the floor, and the door line carries loads of its own. The design basis for slabs-on-ground in the United States is [ACI 360R, Guide to Design of Slabs-on-Ground](https://www.concrete.org/portals/0/files/pdf/previews/360r-10web.pdf), from the American Concrete Institute. Slab thickness, reinforcement and subgrade preparation are designed by a licensed engineer, and the most useful thing an owner can give that engineer is the heaviest aircraft the hangar will ever need to hold, not the one parked in it today. If you fly a single-engine piston aircraft now but might base a turboprop or a light jet there later, say so before design. The floor is the one part of a hangar you cannot upgrade later without breaking it out. The floor also has code requirements of its own. Under [Section 412.3 of the International Building Code](https://codes.iccsafe.org/s/IBC2021P1/chapter-4-special-detailed-requirements-based-on-occupancy-and-use/IBC2021P1-Ch04-Sec412.3), hangar floors are graded and drained so water and fuel cannot stand on them, with floor drains discharging through an oil separator. Small lease spaces of 2,000 square feet or less, where there is no servicing, washing or fueling, can instead be graded toward the door. The slope, the drains and the separator all have to be set before the pour, which makes them concrete decisions rather than plumbing ones. ## Where the Concrete Knowledge Comes In This is where I will be specific about my own background, because it is the part of our capability that is least common in a metal building contractor. I have completed two American Concrete Institute certificate programs through ACI University: Fundamentals of Concrete and Materials in June 2024, and Fundamentals of Concrete Construction in August 2024. Between them they cover how concrete is made (aggregates, cementitious materials, chemical admixtures and reinforcement) and how it is built: floor and slab construction, joints and reinforcement for slabs-on-ground, crack control, placement and finishing, hot- and cold-weather concreting, and the ACI 301 specification for structural concrete. I want to be precise about what that means, because the concrete industry is precise about it. These are ACI education programs, not one of ACI s exam-based field certifications, and they do not make me the engineer of record or the testing lab. The engineer designs the slab. An independent lab with ACI-certified technicians tests the concrete on the day. What the training gives me is the ability to hold the engineer s design, the lab s results and the concrete subcontractor s work to what the specification actually says. On a hangar slab, that looks like this: The mix submittal is checked against the specification before the first truck is dispatched. Strength, water-cementitious ratio, slump, air content and admixtures, reviewed while changing them is still a phone call. The subgrade is right before anything else is. A heavy floor on a poorly prepared subgrade fails however good the concrete is, so compaction and the vapor retarder are checked, not assumed. Joints are laid out and cut on time. Contraction joints are placed to stay out of wheel paths and the door track wherever the layout allows, and sawn in the short window after finishing and before the slab cracks on its own. In West Texas heat that window is shorter than most crews expect. Hot-weather placement and curing are planned, not improvised. Most of our work happens in Texas summers. Placement timing, protection and curing are where a floor keeps or loses the strength it was designed for. Test results are read as they arrive, not filed. Cylinder breaks are compared with the specified strength as the lab reports them, so a problem is found while there is still something to do about it. That is what I mean when I say we stand behind the concrete. The engineer s design, the lab s numbers and the finished slab should all tell the same story, and on our jobs the person responsible for making sure they do understands all three. ## The Door Is a Structural Decision The second thing that decides a hangar is the door. Hangar doors are chosen for the aircraft s wingspan and tail height, and the choice changes the building. Bi-fold and hydraulic doors hang their weight on the building frame at the header. The end-wall framing and the columns either side of the opening have to be designed for that door from the start, which means the door manufacturer and the metal building engineer need to be working from the same numbers before the building is ordered. Sliding and stacking doors run on a bottom track, which moves the load and the precision into the slab. The track has to be set level and true along the whole opening, and the slab along the door line is designed to carry it. That is a concrete detail as much as a door detail. Either way, the door is ordered with the building, not after it. A hangar where the door was an afterthought is a hangar that gets a reinforced header added in the field. ## Fire Protection Depends on the Hangar Group Fire protection for hangars is set by [NFPA 409, Standard on Aircraft Hangars](https://www.nfpa.org/codes-and-standards/nfpa-409-standard-development/409), applied through the building and fire codes your jurisdiction has adopted. NFPA 409 sorts hangars into groups by door height, fire area and construction type. Under the 2022 and earlier editions, a hangar with an aircraft access door taller than 28 feet, or a single fire area larger than 40,000 square feet, is Group I, and smaller hangars fall into Group II or Group III depending on area and construction. The 2026 edition raises that door-height threshold to 35 feet. For an owner, the point is that the group sets the fire protection scope, and on a larger hangar the fire protection can move the budget more than the steel does. Which edition applies depends on what your fire marshal has adopted, so it is one of the first things we settle, before the door height is fixed. ## The Roof Over It A hangar is one very large roof over very expensive equipment, which is where our standing-seam roof certification earns its place. I hold MBCI's [Standing Seam Roof Installation Certification](https://www.mbci.com/metal-institute/classes/standing-seam-roof-installation-certification-class/) for the Ultra-Dek, Double-Lok, BattenLok HS, SuperLok, LokSeam and Craftsman HB systems. MBCI requires a certified installer for its Standard III and Single Source weathertightness warranties, so a hangar roofed in one of those systems can carry a manufacturer-backed warranty against leaks. Over an aircraft, that is worth having in writing. ## One Contractor for the Whole Building Put together, that is a combination you do not often find under one general contractor: concrete training focused on slabs-on-ground, a manufacturer certification for the roof, a Project Management Professional (PMP) running the schedule, and a record of repeatable metal buildings at remote energy sites for operators who prequalify their contractors through ISNetworld. We are veteran-owned, and we run hangar work the way we run everything else: one plan, one point of contact, and nothing left to the field that should have been decided on paper. The frame is the easy part. We put our attention where hangars actually fail, the floor and the door, and we bring the same discipline we used on four SCADA-equipped facilities in the Permian Basin. If you are planning a hangar in Texas, Oklahoma or Arkansas, start by telling us the largest aircraft it will ever need to hold. Everything else is designed from that number. Frequently Asked Questions Quick answers to the most common questions about this topic What determines how thick an aircraft hangar slab needs to be? Do aircraft hangar floors need special drainage? Should a hangar door be chosen before the metal building is ordered? What fire protection does an aircraft hangar need? Can a metal hangar roof carry a manufacturer weathertightness warranty? Have a question not answered here? 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