India Gets its First Inflatable Hangar at Hyderabad Airport

NEW DELHI: Hyderabad Airport has got India’s first inflatable hangar that can house up to an Airbus A320/Boeing 737 size aircraft. GMR Aero Technic (GAT), the group’s maintenance, repair and overhaul division arm, says it is “the only MRO in the Asia region to have installed such a hangar … may be used for multiple purposes including scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, engine or landing gear replacement.”

The one bay narrow body inflatable hangar will add one additional bay to GAT’s existing 7 bays. With this, GAT says it be able to handle additionally 15 to 20 smaller base maintenance checks or 4 to 5 end of lease checks per year.
“It takes considerable amount of time to source an available hangar to undertake the unscheduled repairs. On the contrary, an inflatable hangar is cost-effective, reduces downtime to a minimum and saves time and money… The life of an inflatable hangar is 10-15 years … Whereas the construction of a conventional hangar takes more than 18 months, the inflatable hangar can be constructed in 3-4 months. (It) is also portable and takes just 1-2 months to disassembly and assembly at other location,” GMR Group said in a statement.
The inflatable hangar is formed by low pressure tubes aligned parallel to each other forming a “rib-cage” structure. This woven polyester base cloth with PVC coating hangar is fire-retardant and water-proof. It is built to withstand wind speeds up to 158.4 km/hr and can handle temperatures from -30 degree Celsius to +70 degree Celsius.
GMR Aero Technic CEO Ashok Gopinath said: “The latest addition of this inflatable hangar to our MRO will help us take additional business and support our customers in meeting their timelines and commitments of aircraft operations and redeliveries. Such hangars are used as a proper alternative to conventional hangars by MROs in Europe and GCC for many years now. In the long term, we are looking at adding a couple of more hangars aimed at upgrading to include wide body aircraft capability including painting, certain critical components workshops and military MRO business.”

Source: ToI