Fort Scott Municipal Airport

Project OverviewDescripción del proyecto

When the City of Fort Scott projected a 60% increase in jet traffic over the next five years at Fort Scott Municipal Airport, city leaders needed a team to improve the runway with a low impact on airport operations. Emery Sapp & Sons (ESS) proposed the use of stringless paving to decrease the project schedule and optimize the budget for the city. Working with the airport, ESS created a plan to complete the repaving job while minimizing runway shutdown time.

A specialty asphalt mix design was necessary due to quality and density requirements for plane landing and takeoff. ESS understood that cracked and thin asphalt could harm planes, so they used the ESS Asphalt division to produce a product up to company quality control standards, ensuring a long-lasting, healthy runway.

Safety is always a top priority, especially with ongoing airport traffic during phase one of this project. ESS coordinated with the client to ensure safety for both the project team and the air traffic. In the second phase of the project, ESS and the city agreed to shut down the runway for maximum efficiency and the safety of project teams.

Stringless paving, a system that uses technology that relies on coordinate-based 3D (CAD) models to control the machinery, was instrumental in executing a precisely level runway. ESS model teams worked in real-time programming elevations to accommodate for the runway’s variable depths. The stringless paver follows fixed points to control elevation and steer the paving, resulting in an improved runway and taxiway. Using this technology, the team stayed ahead of schedule by 24 days, and ESS completed 62,891 SY of asphalt paving & 4,728 SY of pavement preservation in just 16 days.