Definition
Minor cosmetic or structural damage to an aircraft caused by contact with hangar walls, doors, equipment, tugs, or other aircraft during ground handling, towing, or storage rather than during flight operations.
Plain English
Small dings, scrapes, or dents picked up on the ground when an aircraft is bumped while being moved in or out of the hangar or parked next to other aircraft.
Context Anchor
Seen during preflight inspection, especially when checking outer wing surfaces, wingtips, the tail section, and areas that may have been bumped while the airplane was parked or moved.
Derivation
‘Hangar’ is the building where aircraft are stored, and ‘rash’ is borrowed from the everyday sense of a skin irritation — small surface marks that appear without a single dramatic cause. Together the term captures the idea of accumulated minor scuffs that aircraft pick up sitting around on the ground.
Why Pilots Care
Even minor hangar rash can require repair, affect aerodynamic smoothness on critical surfaces, and signal the need for better ground handling procedures to avoid larger safety or cost issues.
Analogy
It is like finding a door ding on a car after it has been parked in a tight garage. The mark may be small, but you still want to know where it came from and whether anything deeper was damaged.
Intuition Check
Hangar rash does not mean a problem with the hangar, and it does not mean damage caused in flight. It means small aircraft damage caused by contact with something while the aircraft is on the ground.
Example Sentence 1
During preflight, the pilot noticed fresh hangar rash on the left wingtip and called the maintenance shop before signing for the airplane.
Example Sentence 2
Using a wing walker when taxiing the aircraft out of the hangar helps prevent hangar rash on the wingtips.