ABSTRACT
The life blood of commercial service airports is the revenue derived from the airlines serving the airport and passengers flowing through the airport. Single runway commercial service airports in need of major runway pavement rehabilitation have a major dilemma – how to keep air carrier operations uninterrupted during construction. Do they accept months of runway and therefore airport closure, or do they use ‘nighttime’ runway closures to maintain normal ‘daytime’ operations? A similar dilemma applies to multiple runway airports where scheduled airline operations are near the limits of airfield capacity and closure of a runway would significantly increase delay to aircraft operations. Do they accept months of runway closure resulting in congestion, delay and disruption to airline flight operations?
A true life-cycle cost analysis must consider the direct and indirect costs of the runway reconstruction, the length of time to complete the project, airline revenue loss and schedule disruption costs, future maintenance costs of the reconstructed option and length of service life the reconstruction will provide. Three runway pavement rehabilitation options (cases) are used to demonstrate the engineering and economic life cycle cost analysis of alternatives for an existing commercial service concrete runway: 1) long term closure and reconstruction with portland cement concrete; 2) nighttime closures and rehabilitation using asphaltic concrete overlays; and 3) nighttime closures and reconstruction using VRH (very rapid hardening) calcium sulfoaluminate cement concrete.
