Why are airplane hangers called hangers?

Answer 1

The spelling is close, but it's not the word hanger (person or thing that hangs or a shaped piece of wood, metal or plastic from which clothes may be hung), but the word hangar. Hence, I can understand your confusion.

Hangar comes from the French meaning open shed.

From the website below:
Thereby hangs a tale
More aviation. John Rodkey of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, forwarded a query from his colleague Chet Stilabower, which said:
"The other day my five year old grandson ask me, why do they call the place you put your airplane a hangar? I didn't know so I did some research. A friend of mine who researches for Disney came up with this:
"First usage of the word was in 1835 in Oxford England in this statement: 'Mademoiselle may I put your carriage in the hangar?'
"As we know the horseless carriage evolved into the motor carriage which we see stored in an enclosure called a garage. In that case why wasn't the term hangar handed down to be the enclosure for the now known automobile? Where was hangar first associated [with] airplanes. Also, why wasn't it spelled hanger rather than hangar? Bottom line, why is a hangar called a hangar? I have had many people speculate but no one has any facts. I thought maybe somewhere around the college there may be some information lurking some where in the corners that you could help me with."

Last things first. It's called a hangar because it came, via French, from the Latin angarium for shed, or stable, or shoeing forge. The sense of "hanging" had nothing to do with it. Hanger, incidentally, comes from the Germanic hang, probably from the very old German khang-.
Hangar arrived into English in the late 17th century, by way of the 16th century French angar, defined as "an open shed, or hovell, wherein husbandmen set their ploughes, &tc, out of the sun, and weather" (Cotgrave's French-English Dictionary, London 1611) and dropped out of use until the early 19th century, was revived briefly and then lapsed again until, presumably, someone was looking for a suitable word for an aircraft shed.
I can't answer the "Why?" questions, but I can speculate that hangar would have stayed dead without the advent of aircraft.
The word garage was also "reinvented" from French when a word was needed for the new-fangled horseless carriages. Garage comes from garer, a verb meaning to dock ships. It is recorded in the London Daily Mail of 1902 in the sense of a large storage facility. The sense of a private structure for individual cars came later.

Answer 2

Plane Hangers

Answer 3

They're not called hangErs - they are HangArs. Nothing to do with the English word "hang", it's from French (they built the first ones) meaning a type of shed.

Answer 4

To expand on JohnTAdams3's answer, we get a fair bit of aviation terminology from French. The military referrs to a mission as a sortie. From the French word meaning "exit." You counted your sorties when you exited from the plane alive. Airplanes weren't very reliable in the early days, hence the somewhat morbid way of counting missions.

Answer 5

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Answer 6

that's not a hanger but a hangar.

Answer 7

Because of the steel archwork. It is a good question. I found the answer out myself first hand by surviving four hurricanes on a Florida airport. The hurricanes blew off the metal plated walls that was riveted to the steel archwork showing how the metal plated walls hang onto each separate arch steel frame.

Answer 8

Maybe its cause a pulley is always used to carry airplane stuff around the hanger and is used to keep it off the ground to have more ground space and to keep the parts from being damaged

Answer 9

It's wear air planes Hang around.

Key word = hang

Answer 10

hangArs, with an 'a'. It's from an old French word that meant 'shed.'