DEVELOPMENT OF MAINTENANCE STRATEGIES FOR AIRFIELD PAVEMENTS

Abstract

Normally, the maintenance of airfield pavements is not conducted in a routine way. Many reasons can be pointed out for that, such as inadequate and timely maintenance, lack of financial resources, lack of maintenance strategies and lack of trained personnel, etc. In general, the airfield pavement maintenance is carried out for correcting problems that could have been avoided if the preventive maintenance were a routine practice. It has been observed that if one carries out a preventive instead of a corrective maintenance, the costs for maintaining the airfield pavements could be as lower as 4 to 8 times. For this reason, it is important that administrators and technicians have broad knowledge on these aspects and on the new technologies available on the subject. In this dissertation report, an attempt has been made to study different types of airfield pavement failures, methods of airfield pavement evaluation and maintenance measures. The pavement performance of the airfield pavements of three airport namely Civil Airport, Pantnagar, Jolly Grant Airport, Dehradun and Safdarjung Airport, Delhi have been evaluated with respect to the deflection, roughness and PCI survey. It was found that Civil Airport, Pantnagar and Jolly Grant Airport, Dehradun were observed to be in good condition with respect to all three criteria, where as Safdarjung Airport, Delhi was having low PCI and is in immediate need for maintenance. Accordingly, the maintenance strategies as per the PCI survey have been recommended for the airport.