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Twenty years of sun, heat, rain, cold, ice, snow and traffic left the runway at the Albert J. Ellis Airport in Jacksonville, NC, showing signs of oxidation and some slight cracking. It was time for rehabilitation of the 7,100-foot runway.

The problem facing the airport commission and the contractor was how to work on the only runway when two commercial airlines operate 12 flights in and out of the airport a day? There were only two alternatives:

1) Work at night over a long period of time, or

2) Close the runway and work non-stop until the work was completed.

Airport Director Jerry Vickers says the project involved milling off one inch of pavement of the 7,400-foot long (including blast pads), 150-foot-wide runway and then overlaying it with two inches of asphalt. To make matters a bit more complicated a 532-foot-long, 48-inch drainage pipe needed to be replaced under the runway.

Barnhill Contracting Company, based in Tarboro, NC, was the successful bidder and offered a solution that met the needs of both Vickers and the contract management team of Reynolds, Smith and Hills Inc., an engineering firm based in Jacksonville, FL. Barnhill would use pavers equipped with Topcon Millimeter GPS to complete the job in 60 hours.

“Our issue here was we had a drainage pipe spanning under a section of the runway that had been there quite a number of years and it needed to come out,” Vickers says. “We had to shut down for two and a half days to get the pipe taken care of. The pipe excavation and replacement provided a good opportunity to pave as much of the rest of the runway as we could instead of having to do that at night, in five- and six-hour increments.