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Custom Steel Aircraft Hangars & Aviation Buildings

Protect your investment with industry-leading, custom-engineered steel aviation structures built for durability, security, and maximum functional space.

​At Reich Construction LLC, we specialize in designing and constructing premium steel airplane hangars, private aviation facilities, and commercial FBO (Fixed Base Operator) buildings across the United States. Whether you house a single-engine private Cessna or a fleet of commercial aircraft, our custom steel solutions deliver unmatched structural integrity and clear-span capability.

Why Choose Steel for Aviation & Plane Hangars?

When it comes to aviation construction, steel is the gold standard. Traditional wood or pole-barn structures lack the expansive, column-free floor plans required for safe aircraft movement.

• 100% Clear-Span Engineering: Our advanced steel framing eliminates interior support columns, giving you maximum uninterrupted floor space to easily maneuver aircraft, equipment, and maintenance tools.

• Massive Clear Openings: Easily accommodate large overhead bifold, hydraulic, or sliding hangar doors without compromising the structural load of the building.

• Superior Durability & Weather Resistance: Engineered to withstand heavy snow loads, high winds, and severe weather, protecting your valuable aircraft year-round.

• Low Maintenance & Longevity: Unlike wood or fabric structures, commercial-grade steel resists rotting, pest damage, and fire, significantly reducing long-term upkeep costs.

• Energy Efficiency & Climate Control: Easily integrate high-performance insulation systems to keep your hangar comfortable during maintenance work in extreme temperatures.

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Side view of a steel-framed cannabis greenhouse under construction, showcasing the expansive structure and potential for scalability.
Side view of a steel-framed cannabis greenhouse under construction, showcasing the expansive structure and potential for scalability.

The Reich Advantage: Architectural Excellence in Metal Buildings

Most contractors treat pre-engineered buildings as “metal boxes.” At Reich Construction LLC, we specialize in customized metal building design. We combine the efficiency of steel with high-end architectural finishes to create a structure that represents your brand.

Our Turnkey Capabilities Include:

• Comprehensive Design-Build: We manage everything—from initial site planning and architectural renderings to structural engineering and final construction.

• Energy-Efficient Envelopes: We integrate advanced insulation systems and R-value optimized panels to significantly reduce your long-term operating costs.

• Versatile Exterior Finishes: Customize your facility with glass curtain walls, masonry veneers, or premium EIFS finishes for a sophisticated, modern look.

The Reich Advantage: Architectural Excellence in Metal Buildings

Building Type Ideal Use Case Key Highlights
Private Airplane Hangars Personal aircraft storage, weekend flyers, and airparks. Cost-effective, compact to mid-size footprints, quick erection time.
Commercial Aviation Hangars Regional airports, flight schools, and charter services. Multi-plane capacity, integrated office spaces, and heavy-duty utility layouts.
FBO & Terminal Facilities Pilot lounges, customer reception areas, and flight planning rooms. Architectural integration, upscale finishes, and climate-controlled comfort.
Maintenance & Repair Shops Aircraft servicing, avionics upgrades, and painting bays. High clearance heights, crane integration, and heavy-duty ventilation support.
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See Us At Work Around the Country

Architect-Led Steel Building Design & Construction in all 50 States

This week Bruno visits two Maryland projects decades apart — a wood-frame convenience store in Waldorf and a recreation center in Port Tobacco — to make a point that comes up more often than it should: when a building design gets complicated, the instinct to abandon pre-engineered steel in favor of conventional construction is almost always the wrong call. The Waldorf building, built over 40 years ago for Convenient Food Mart, features a hipped roof with eyebrow-shaped windows on each side; Bruno’s first exposure to curved framing. In wood, the process is forgiving. You frame the flat end, space your joists at a foot on center, and cut each piece to fit as you go. The material is cheap, the tolerances are loose, and the whole thing comes together incrementally. It works. In steel, that same approach becomes a fabrication and coordination problem, and that’s exactly what played out at the Port Tobacco Recreation Center. The Port Tobacco gym was designed with the same eyebrow window feature on a pyramid roof, a detail that looked straightforward on the architect’s drawings but carried two very different price tags depending on how it was executed. Reich Construction presented both options clearly: build the PEMB roof in the standard way and frame the eyebrow windows over it for appearance only, or open the roof structure beneath the windows to bring light into the main space — more complex, more expensive, but architecturally what the design intended. The recommendation was to sit down with the owner and architect before proceeding. The GC chose the cheaper number instead, built it, and then discovered the owner wanted the more expensive version all along. Reich Construction backed out. The GC built the entire building in conventional steel. It cost roughly three times what pre-engineered steel would have.
Reich Construction LLC - Complex Metal Building Features
This week Bruno is in Sugar Land, Texas, at Flex Space Connect, a national conference drawing over 500 developers who specialize in small-bay industrial. If you haven’t heard the term, you’ve seen the product: long, efficient metal buildings divided into individual rental bays, each with an overhead door and a walk door or storefront, occupied by local tradespeople, retailers, dance studios, and small contractors who need functional space without a long-term commercial lease. It’s one of the fastest-growing real estate asset classes in the country, and pre-engineered steel is the reason it works. The math is straightforward. Small-bay industrial tenants need durable, flexible, low-maintenance space. Pre-engineered steel delivers exactly that: clear-span bays that can be subdivided or reconfigured, overhead doors that integrate directly into the framing, standing seam roofs that last 50 years without significant maintenance, and a construction timeline that gets the building occupied and generating income faster than almost any other building type. The demand is there. The supply isn’t keeping up. And the developers who are moving now — before institutional capital fully arrives — are the ones who will have set the market by the time it does. Forty years ago, self-storage was in exactly this position.
Reich Construction LLC - Flex Space Metal Buildings
This week Bruno walks through the design process for a car dealership expansion — a project type that shows up more often than you'd think in the metal building world. The existing facility follows the industry's typical layout: a glass-wrapped showroom up front, offices and parts storage behind it, a drive-through drop-off lane on the side, and an eight-station repair shop in the back. The expansion adds repair stations, extends the drive-through canopy, and adds an outdoor equipment room for used oil storage, compressors, and support equipment. Almost every car dealership is a hybrid structure: custom conventional steel up front where the glass curtainwall and flat roof require it, and a straightforward pre-engineered steel building everywhere else. The expansion follows the same logic — and the entire design process, from massing to structural optimization to pricing, runs through Butler's Omni program. What that means in practice is that we can model the existing building, lay in the additions, evaluate framing options, assign code-correct loads, specify cladding and insulation, place openings, detail trim and gutters, and generate preliminary pricing — all before a single drawing goes to the county. When the model is right, everything that comes out of it is right.
Reich Construction LLC - Metal Building Design Optimization
This week we're pulling back the curtain on a project closer to home — literally. On his own 10-acre property in Maryland, Bruno is redesigning a utility building he constructed in 1995 into an office that takes full advantage of everything he’s built around it since: a fig orchard, a peach orchard, mulberry trees, hostas, and canna lilies that cycle through color and fruit from June through August. The original building has served its purpose. Now it's time for it to serve a better one. Most buildings ignore the site they sit on. They're oriented without regard to sun angle, prevailing wind, or views. They're energy inefficient by default and expensive to operate as a result. This design is a demonstration of what's possible when you treat those factors as design inputs rather than afterthoughts using simple geometry, inexpensive materials, and a few well-placed windows to build something that's comfortable, efficient, and connected to its surroundings.
Reich Construction LLC - Metal Building Design in Columbia, MD
This week Bruno isn't at a job site, he's at the Prince George's County Administration Building, testifying before the County Council on behalf of Second Family Inc., a nonprofit that houses medically fragile children in the Maryland suburbs. The issue at hand is a sewer development category reclassification: the properties Second Family operates sit in a 1950s subdivision with private septic fields that no longer meet modern standards, and the soil conditions rule out an upgrade in place. Getting a public sewer connection requires a zoning category change, and that means making the case directly to the council. This is a side of design-build that doesn't show up in project photos but shapes every project from the start. Permits, utility approvals, zoning hearings, and government coordination are part of the path from concept to construction. In dense jurisdictions like Prince George's County, that path can be long and complicated. Bruno has been navigating it for 45 years, and it's one of the core services Reich Construction provides. We don't hand clients a set of drawings and wish them luck with the county. We walk the project through every approval it needs, from the first napkin sketch to the ribbon cutting.
Reich Construction LLC - Design-Build and Permitting in Prince George's County, MD
This week Bruno is out in Charlottesville in 100-degree August heat, sealing up 15 large roof curbs on a standing seam roof. Each curb represents a penetration through the roof plane — and each one is a potential leak point. The curbs on this project are the retrofit variety: installed after the roof is in place, which means cutting openings in the panels, sliding the curb underneath the uphill sheets and over the downhill sheets, fitting closures around the standing seams, and sealing everything with mastic and caulk before fastening it down. It's a precise, time-consuming process, and its long-term reliability depends entirely on every bead of caulk and every neoprene washer holding up year after year. The preferred approach is simpler and more durable: curbs manufactured to match the standing seam module, designed to wrap into the seams and set in place as the roof is being installed. No cutting, no patching, no closures fitted around existing seams. The curb goes down with the roof, the seams integrate with the curb geometry, and the result doesn't rely on caulk and screws to stay watertight. With 15 curbs on a single roof, the difference in long-term maintenance between the two approaches is significant. Specifying the right curb at the right time — before the roof goes on — is one of those decisions that costs nothing extra and pays for itself many times over.
Reich Construction - Standing Seam Roof Curbs in Charlottesville, VA
This week we're back at a recycling facility in Charlottesville, Virginia that we erected a few months ago, this time to address the framing needed to support 11 loading dock positions along one side of the building. Each position requires a dock shelter, dock leveler, truck restraint system, and bumpers. When the structure wasn't originally designed to accommodate that hardware, we came back to add what was needed. The retrofit process involved removing the siding at each opening, adding framing around the doors, installing a header across the top, and fitting two layers of fire-rated plywood to create a continuous attachment zone for the dock shelter contractor. We went that route because dock shelter manufacturers often can't provide exact bolt locations in advance — giving them a full field to attach to is simply the more practical solution. It worked well, and the building is now properly set up for the dock equipment. The bigger takeaway is that when this kind of coordination happens during design, the framing goes in with the building and there's nothing to retrofit.
Reich Construction - Metal Building Dock Shelter Retrofit in Charlottesville, VA
This week Bruno is at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin — one of the world's largest airshows — meeting with clients looking to build aircraft hangars. Hangars are straightforward metal buildings in most respects, but the doors are an engineering category of their own. After evaluating the options, we've zeroed in on Powerlift Hydraulic Doors as the manufacturer we're confident can handle roughly 90% of the hangar projects we encounter nationwide. Their doors are self-supporting, integrate cleanly into a metal building frame, and come in under most competing systems on both first cost and long-term maintenance. The standard frame for doors up to 20 feet tall and 60 feet wide uses 5x3 rectangular tube steel posts — wall thickness scaled to whatever the existing jamb condition can handle, from ¼" where we can weld to a heavy I-beam, up to ⅜" where the jamb has little inherent strength. The header is a 5" square tube tied into drop columns or channel iron across the top of the opening. On T-hangar applications where the door frame is doing structural work, a truss is built on top of the header to carry roof purlins directly. The pivot points run bronze bushings, greased once at assembly and never again — Bruno ran an accelerated wear test on a lathe at 17 RPM for a week and calculated the equivalent of opening and closing the door once a day for over 2,300 years before measurable wear. Zero maintenance is not a marketing claim here. It's math.
Reich Construction - Metal Building Hangars in Oshkosh, WI
This week we're wrapping up a 30x40 light gauge steel utility building on a small farm in Mount Airy. The structure is built entirely from roll-formed shapes: 14" wide, 11-gauge roll-form channels at the door openings and corners, doubled up to form the main frame columns, with matching roll-form beams and knee braces at the ceiling. Wall girts are 4" roll-formed Z-sections, which is notably shallower than the 8" girts you'd find on a conventional PEMB, while the roof purlins run the standard 8" depth you'd expect for a building this size. Rounding it out is a simple mezzanine framed from 6" Z-shaped roll-form purlins with a ¾" CDX plywood deck on top — an inexpensive way to pick up usable storage without a complicated structure. Roll-formed shapes come off a single machine in the factory, making them faster and less expensive to produce than the welded plate assemblies used in conventional pre-engineered steel. A standard PEMB column is built up from a web and two flanges made of quarter to half-inch plate steel, continuously welded and tapered to match the load diagram. Light gauge skips all of that. For a building in the 1,000 to 3,000 square foot range, that tradeoff makes sense. For anything approaching 10,000 square feet or more, we'd steer you toward a conventional PEMB due to the demand on the loads and spans.
Reich Construction - Cold Formed Metal Building Erection in Mount Airy MD
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