Liverpool John Lennon Airport Runway Strengthening / Resurfacing and Refurbishment of Taxiway Alpha

Client: Peel Holdings / Amec (Management Contractor)
Value: £9.0 million
Duration: 9 months
Completion: June 2007

Early contractor involvement allowed the airport to maintain normal operations.

An effective team partnership and early involvement on the contract allowed Tarmac, in conjunction with Amec, to undertake a value engineering exercise as part of six months of planning and pavement design.

A phased programme of night works was jointly designed and developed to maintain airport operations and keep the landing strip open during the day.

Comment
“Tarmac’s materials engineers, Project Management team and myself really went into some depth from day one to get the correct material for the job”.
Roy Thompson, Airport Engineer

Comment
“Rideability is excellent”.
Marcus Scrafton, Head of Development

Runway works were completed each night in a restricted working window.

The contract involved removal of the existing surfacing to a depth of 100mm followed by a 100mm deep base material, 60mm of Marshall Asphalt binder course and 50mm of Marshall Asphalt surface course. This was laid to the entire 2,367m long, 45m wide landing strip and 7.5m wide shoulders.

Working five or six nights a week, possession of the runway commenced at 23.30hrs with cold milling, by NRP. Upon completion, at approximately 01.00 hrs, laying commenced with three paving machines laying in echelon formation. The runway had to be handed back by 06.00hrs and therefore surfacing was programmed to be complete by 04.30hrs.

The Marshall Asphalt surface course, grooving to the surface and permanent lining was carried out on the following night.

A total of 75,000 tonnes of bituminous material was mixed on site.

Tarmac erected and operated two asphalt plants within the airport. Mixing commenced each night at 21.30 hrs with a minimum of 300 tonnes kept in the associated hot storage facilities before any of the material was batched and transported onto site.

The material feedstock, all sourced from Tarmac’s own quarries, was replenished during the daytime, with enough raw materials maintained to undertake two nights work.

The initial Marshall Asphalt design was independently tested at Test Houses in Ettingshall, Tarmac’s UKAS approved laboratory. All subsequent sampling and testing was undertaken using on site facilities. There were a total of 9 No. technicians on site each evening.

4,840 tonnes of recovered planings were recycled into FoamMaster and relaid.

Surfacing of the two 7.5m wide shoulders running parallel to the main landing strip incorporated a base layer of Tarmac’s FoamMaster recycled asphalt produced from planings recovered from the main landing strip. This was the first time that a foamed bitumen product had been used on a UK airport runway.

To facilitate this, one of Tarmac’s own mobile FoamMaster mixing units was located on site. During each nightly possession the generated planings were taken to the site compound, stockpiled and then processed during the day into requisite aggregate sizes. FoamMaster was mixed at night and delivered direct to the paving machine.

Sufficient resource planning, with back-up, provided a defect free contract.

There were up to 150 people on site each night and up to 50 No. 20t delivery lorries permanently based at the airport at any one time, shuttling between planing machines, asphalt plants and pavers.

Items of spare plant were on standby for every item in use. There were no remedials on the contract throughout the duration, despite being carried out over a six-month period working nights in winter. Bad weather stopped work on only 22 nights.

The volumes of material laid per night (up to 1,400t of Marshall Asphalt binder course) are the largest Tarmac have produced and laid in single shifts.

To keep the airport operational, Taxiway Alpha was completed in seven phases.

Refurbishment of Taxiway Alpha followed completion of the main runway works. Four phases where carried out on days with a temporary haul route though the General Aviation area and onto site. The remaining three areas were undertaken at night under the same conditions as the runway, with a hand back time of 06.00hrs every morning. All the material for the Alpha works was supplied from Tarmac’s own off site asphalt plants.

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