Using aircraft simulation, APR can quickly identify the location of runway roughness and quantify how rough it is. Another great aspect of this technology is the ability to help an airport fix the roughness it may have. In this article, I want to demonstrate how APR uses aircraft simulation to help repair an area of roughness.

As with any other runway project, it starts with measuring the pavement’s profile using APR’s Auto Rod and Level. Using aircraft simulation APR’s analysts will identify the location of an event area causing pilot and passenger complaints. As seen below in Figure 1, the runway has a lot of grade associated with it, making it difficult to see any details of the pavement. The inset plot shows the profile plotted with the grade removed around the bump’s location. This inset plot shows a bump approximately 120 feet long by 2 inches in amplitude. As shown in Figure 2, when simulating a 737-800 performing a takeoff operation, quite a bit of aircraft response was generated - enough to consistently produce pilot and passenger complaints.

 

The next step in the process is to actually fix the problem. Looking at the event area, the analyst will optimize a repair - balancing the amount of material to be removed (or added in the case of an overlay) verses the resulting ride quality for that repair. Figure 3 shows the analytically repaired profile compared to the before profile. Figure 4 illustrates the ride quality of the repaired profile showing a much improved ride for the pilot and passengers.

 

The capability of analytically repairing runway roughness using aircraft simulation is unique to APR. Not only does this iterative process optimize the pavement repair, saving money and pavement down-time, the results also reduce the dynamic loading on the pavement and the wear and tear on the aircraft. If you would like to talk about pavement repair for a situation similar to this, please contact us.