Performance of Concrete Airfield Pavements at United States Air Force Bases

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This paper describes how, throughout the United States under different commands with different military missions, the United States Air Force (USAF) operates over 100 airfields. The majority of these airfields were originally constructed during World War II of rigid (concrete) pavement, and in some cases, the 1940's era pavement is still in operation. Although many of the original concrete pavements have been reconstructed in the past 20 to 40 years, the majority of these pavements have exceeded their expected design life. The intent of this paper is to study the evolution of concrete airfield pavements and see if the resulting performance is affected by: (1) changes in design approaches; (2) climatic region of each airfield; and (3) causes of common distress types. Since 1999, the ERES Consultants Division of Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ERES) has performed airfield pavement condition surveys at over 40 Air Force bases in the United States. Inspection crews have performed Pavement Condition Index (PCI) surveys on each airside pavement and updated the construction history information provided by the Air Force Civil Engineering Support Agency (AFCESA). For each airfield inspection, a database was created in the MicroPAVER pavement management software with basic inventory information and the distress data collected during the PC1 surveys. The individual databases were combined into one large MicroPAVER database that was used for this study.