ForConstructionPros.com

“It’s much more efficient for the contractor to muster his resources and do this compressed two and a half day paving schedule,” he explains. The airport was closed Tuesday night through Friday morning because that time period had the fewest travelers.

Ninety five percent of the $4.1 million project was funded through the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airport Improvement Program, 2.5 percent by the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Division of Aviation, and the remainder of the project was funded by passenger facility charges, which are the surcharges airports impose on tickets sold. “Over the 60-hour shutdown, we spent $3 million of the total funds. That’s the scope and scale of what we did over two and a half days,” Vickers says.

Tackling the project

Mark Collins of Barnhill Contracting Company was the senior project manager for the project and knew at the start that this was a big job, given the designated timeframe. The FAA required Barnhill to hit all the design grades within a half-inch. Because the milling operation was a variable and they could not guarantee the grade they would be working from, Collins and Thumper Swann, Barnhill vice president, believed the only way the project could be completed to specification within the allotted time was to use GPS on the pavers.

Why the Topcon Millimeter GPS? “We had been using GPS on our grading equipment. We knew enough about Millimeter GPS to know its reputation for accuracy and reliability. We knew from talking to others in the industry that you could put the model in and basically take off paving and it would hit what you told it to hit with millimeter accuracy,” Collins says.

Barnhill’s plan called for paving 25-foot-wide lanes using two pavers. To do this, crews used two sets of pavers, each equipped with the Topcon Millimeter GPS, which provides enhancement in the vertical-measuring precision of RTK (real-time kinematic) positioning systems.