During the next several years, BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport will undertake a comprehensive series of several airfield pavement rehabilitation and reconstruction projects.
The upgrades will be combined with Runway Safety Area (RSA) improvements. An RSA is a rectangular space around an airport’s runway that provides critical safety margins for arriving and departing aircraft. The overall airfield construction program will ensure that BWI Marshall meets updated RSA standards by the end of 2015, as mandated by Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
BWI Marshall currently operates four runways. Throughout the work, the airport will address each individually to avoid excessive impacts to operations and the traveling public.
Close planning and coordination with the FAA and the airlines identified the critical first phase of work to be the reconstruction of the intersection of the two major air carrier runways at BWI Marshall. Those two runways account for almost all commercial aircraft operations. The milling and overlaying of the intersection pavement must occur before longer-term airfield pavement work can occur in later years.
Due to the complexity of the intersection project, BWI Marshall has worked for months on coordination and consultation with tenant airlines and the FAA. Significant lead time was provided to the airlines to allow for schedule and fleet adjustments to permit regular operations during the intersection construction project.
Twenty years of weather data was examined to help determine the best weekend to schedule the work. BWI Marshall conducted peer reviews and researched other airports that have undergone similar runway projects. The airport utilized lessons learned, and best practices used, by those other airports to plan and design the projects.
Planning and design for the runway intersection project calls for a 54-hour shutdown in order to mill and overlay the entire intersection. During that period, commercial operations will be conducted on a separate runway. Current plans call for the reconstruction project to occur during a weekend in September 2011, when commercial flight activity is somewhat reduced. The work would occur from late Friday night through early Monday morning.
The scheduled weekend closure is the best approach to complete the complicated work. The plan will produce the best quality pavement, with the least cost and the fewest impacts, on normal flight operations.
Jonathan Dean is manager, division of communications, for the Maryland Aviation Administration. He works out of BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport. He can be reached at 410-859-7027 or jdean@bwiairport.com.
