Runway set to go the distance
Calgary airstrip to be longest in the country
Closing the north end of Barlow Trail to make way for airport construction created a ghost town along empty roads, but a closer look reveals that a virtual city has sprung up.
As the massive construction project is underway to create the longest commercial runway in Canada, crews are working around the clock.
The 4.2-kilometre-long runway will be second only to Denver in North America, and will boost Calgary’s international flight market.
“At 14,000 feet, this runway will be able to handle the largest aircraft in the world,” said Bob Schmitt, senior vice-president for planning and engineering at the Calgary International Airport Authority.
Among those would be the A380 and B747-800.
The project, which adds a fourth runway, will double operations at Calgary’s airport.
“We require a runway of this magnitude in order to get large, heavy aircraft to be able to get to Asian destinations,” Schmitt said. “We’re at capacity with our existing airfield and we need this runway to be built so we can accommodate growth in the region and just accommodate business and leisure travel in the Calgary community.”
During a media tour of the site Wednesday to survey progress on the $600-million runway project, crews laying the pathway are about onethird through on the 400-hectare site.
Hundreds of trades workers toil around the clock.
And if anyone’s forgotten the looming deadline, a digital clock mounted inside the town-hall-like trailers that serve as headquarters is counting it down for them.
There are 664 days remaining until the May 2014 deadline.
“We’re about one-third complete right now. It’s like anything: it looks slow during the earthmoving process,” Schmitt said. “As you get into the granular and the pavement, things seem to pick up really quick.”
Co-ordinating more than 350 workers is harder than it looks.
“There are definitely some challenges on a site this large, on a project of this magnitude with the number of trades, but it’s going very smoothly because of the great team that’s working there,” Schmitt said.
Building an airport runway is a far cry from creating a road.
“When you consider the aircraft is one million pounds landing on these types of facilities, they do have to be constructed to accommodate those loads. Those slow, heavy moving aircraft really can cause a lot of pavement failure, so you have to design it properly,” Schmitt said.
Four distinct layers, including subgrade, granular, cement stabilization base and concrete are engineered to handle the pressure of massive aircraft taking off and landing.
All those layers measure 1.2 metres deep.
Pounding rain and lightning have sometimes stalled work, he said.
“Our biggest issue right now is dealing with the wet weather we’ve had so far,” Schmitt said. “It’s going well. We work in areas that are dry and we dry out the areas that are wet and we continue to make good progress. With this new runway we can run simultaneous runway operations, we can almost double the airfield capacity as far as aircraft movement to what’s in the airfield today,” he said.
The Calgary airport has more than doubled in size and passenger volume over the past 15 years. There were a record 12.6 million passengers through Canada’s fourth-busiest airport in 2010.
Meanwhile, the Airport Trail tunnel to go under the new runway is more than half-finished
Workers are trying to finish pouring the sections by Aug. 31. That will see the city turn the project over to the airport authority so it can work on the runway above the tunnel.
The city could be on the hook for a multimillion-dollar penalty if it causes any delays in runway work.
Each of the 50 tunnel sections requires 850 cubic metres of concrete mix, which takes 80 trucks to deliver in a 12-hour period.