India is adding aircraft and airports faster than it is adding places to shelter and service them.
India’s Hangar Shortage Is a $3 Billion Problem — And a Masterclass in Clear-Span Steel
India is buying airplanes faster than it is building roofs to park them under.
By 2035, the country’s commercial fleet is projected to nearly triple to roughly 2,250 aircraft, and the airport network is expanding from 149 airports today toward a planned 200-plus. But underneath those headline numbers sits a gap nobody budgeted for: industry estimates put India short by 300–350 hangars, a shortfall valued at $2.6–3.3 billion, on top of 160–200 ageing hangars that need retrofitting and another 100–120 needed across the air force, army and navy.
If you build, own, or specify large steel structures for a living, this isn’t just an aviation headline. It’s a live demonstration of the one decision that determines whether a big building works for a business or becomes its bottleneck: how well the steel is spanned, before the first column goes up.’
India’s Hangar Math, By the Numbers
The scale of the gap is worth sitting with. ENR reports India is planning up to $40 billion in aviation infrastructure spending through 2040, including an $18–24 billion airport procurement pipeline over just the next four years. Rahul Sharma, EVP at Tata Projects’ Urban Spaces division, has put a number on the maintenance side too: India will need three to four large MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) facilities within the next decade and a half, worth roughly $6 billion combined — a projection from industry, not an official government figure, but a useful order of magnitude.
On the defence side, The Core’s reporting puts the Indian Air Force, Army Aviation Corps and Navy’s combined hangar count above 200 — with planners estimating 100–120 additional modern hangars needed over the next decade. On the civil side, the Airports Authority of India has flagged around 20 priority hangars for retrofit out of 160–200 that need work nationwide. Perhaps the clearest sign of how fast this is moving: two of India’s newest airports, Navi Mumbai and Noida International (Jewar), opened without any dedicated aircraft hangars at all. Bottlenecks like these, the report notes, typically add two to three years to a project’s timeline.
A Familiar Story for Industrial India
None of this is unique to aviation. The same pattern — a building undersized for what it eventually needs to hold — shows up constantly in warehousing and manufacturing, just with lower stakes and less press coverage. A factory that outgrows its clear span in year three is a smaller version of the same planning failure.
Why Every One of These Buildings Will Be Steel, Not Concrete
Here’s the engineering reason hangars are never built in RCC: a column placed anywhere inside an aircraft’s movement path isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a collision hazard. So hangars are designed around clear span — covering the widest possible floor area with zero interior columns — and pre-engineered steel (PEB) is the only construction method that does this economically at scale.
Required clear spans scale directly with what the building needs to hold: roughly 18–24 metres for light aircraft, 24–37 metres for business jets, 40–70 metres for regional and narrow-body commercial aircraft, and 80 metres or more for wide-body or large military aircraft. A typical Indian factory shed, by comparison, usually needs 20–40 metres of clear span — which means most industrial buildings sit on the same engineering spectrum as a hangar, just closer to the lighter end.
The scale this can reach is genuinely striking: a 128-metre-wide, 900-square-metre hangar built in the Philippines used 1,686 metric tons of structural steel in a PEB frame — enough to service multiple large aircraft simultaneously with not a single interior column (PEB Steel case study). Newer stressed-arch systems, which use less steel per metre, are already stretching to spans of up to 300 metres. The takeaway for any buyer: clear-span steel isn’t a premium add-on anymore — for any building where column placement would restrict how the floor gets used, it’s simply the default.
The Lesson for Factory, Warehouse and Logistics Owners
Four decisions hangar engineering forces into the open — and every one of them applies directly to a warehouse, factory or logistics shed:
● Size for the equipment, not the budget line. The most common underspec NLSS sees is a clear span trimmed to cut upfront cost, only for the owner to need a bigger crane, a conveyor line, or a mezzanine within a few years — by which point the frame can’t take it.
● Doors are a structural decision, not a finishing item. An open bay door creates a significant discontinuity in a building’s wind resistance, which engineers have to treat as its own load case — exactly as they do for hangar doors. Decide door sizing with your structural engineer before the layout is final, not after.
● Perimeter foundations carry more, not less. With no interior columns, all the roof load shifts to the edges. Skipping proper soil testing at the perimeter is where column-free buildings run into trouble later.
● Monsoon-proof the drainage math for the whole roof. A wide, single-span roof has a much larger catchment area than a multi-bay shed of the same floor area — the drainage design has to be sized for that, not scaled up from a smaller building.
Planning a new build or an expansion? Talk to NLSS’s design team about your clear-span requirement before you lock in a layout.
Steel vs RCC: The Case Your Board Actually Wants to See
For anyone who has to justify the choice upward, three points do most of the work. First, speed to revenue: steel frames are fabricated off-site while foundation work happens in parallel on-site, which is a large part of why RCC-heavy, large-span projects run into the two-to-three-year bottlenecks mentioned earlier — a PEB building simply starts earning sooner. Second, cost structure: beyond roughly 20–25 metres of span, steel typically costs less once foundation savings are factored in, though doors, cranes and finishing packages need their own line items in both cases, not a change order later. Third, timing: with AAI alone earmarking roughly Rs 3,490 crore for airport modernisation through 2028 and private players like IndiGo and GMR funding MRO and cargo builds in the hundreds of crores, demand for serious fabrication capacity is rising across sectors at once — which argues for locking in a capable steel partner now, ahead of the lead-time crunch a boom like this usually brings.
Quick Answers: Clear-Span Steel Structures in India
What is a clear-span steel structure?
A clear-span steel building uses a pre-engineered steel (PEB) frame to cover a wide floor area with no interior support columns, keeping the entire space open for equipment, vehicles, or aircraft movement.
How wide can a clear-span steel building go?
Standard PEB clear spans run 20–60 metres for most factories and warehouses. Aviation- and logistics-scale structures regularly exceed 70–130 metres, and newer stressed-arch systems have reached spans of up to 300 metres.
Is steel cheaper than RCC for large industrial buildings?
Past roughly 20–25 metres of span, steel usually works out cheaper once foundation savings and faster construction are factored in — though door, crane and finishing costs need to be budgeted separately under either method.
How long does a pre-engineered steel building take to erect versus RCC?
PEB frames are fabricated off-site while foundations are prepared on-site in parallel, which typically cuts erection time well below a poured-in-place RCC structure of the same footprint — exact savings depend on project scope and site conditions.
From Runways to Your Next Build
India’s hangar shortfall is really a symptom of one principle every large steel structure runs on: the building either works for what you’ll need it to hold in five years, or it becomes the thing holding your business back. Whether you’re planning a new factory shed, a warehouse, or an expansion that adds a mezzanine or a heavier crane, the questions are the same ones the aviation industry is being forced to answer in a hurry right now — how wide do you really need to go, where does the load actually go, and have doors and drainage been planned from day one, not bolted on at the end.
Have a large-span build coming up? Request a free structural consultation with NLSS’s engineering team before you finalize your brief — get it right the first time.