Weeksville Naval Air Station Wooden Hangar Site

Built after Pearl Harbor, the second of the two hangars at Weeksville was made of wood, to conserve steel for the war effort. Being made of wood, it was more vulnerable to fires, and burned down in 1995. With the Navy phasing out blimps in the 1950s, Weeksville Naval Air Station was decommissioned in 1957. After that it was used for aerospace research by NASA and others, including testing of one of the first communications satellites, NASA’s Project Echo, a reflective metallic sphere, 100 feet in diameter, which was inflated in the hangar in 1959, and in space in 1960. In 1995, with the site used primarily by Westinghouse, a welder’s torch started a fire in the wooden hangar, burning it to the ground, and destroying the Sentinel 1000, a Westinghouse airship, and other surveillance blimps that were stored inside the hanger. All that remained standing were the two pairs of concrete columns that once supported the doors at either end.  After the fire, Westinghouse sold its airship and surveillance divisions. The wooden hangar site is now used as an aggregate processing site for local construction projects.