Summary and Comparison of Airfield Pavement Inventory, Condition, and Performance Across the United States

Abstract

The use of Airport Pavement Management Systems (APMS) in the United States began in the early 1980s. By the mid 1990s, the use of APMS was prevalent throughout the country, and today, more than 80 percent of one segment of the industry—state aviation agencies—use APMS tools to manage their airports’ pavements. When applied properly, an APMS provides agencies with indispensable information to make cost-effective decisions about the preservation and rehabilitation of the pavement network. Further, an APMS allows agencies to evaluate the long-term impacts of decisions made about their pavement infrastructure. Although state aviation agencies have used APMS tools for over 20 years to store and evaluate pavement inventory, condition, and performance data, no one is reporting on these data at the national level. For example, very limited documentation can be found on overall pavement inventory, condition, and performance at airports in the United States. This is unfortunate because pavement management data compiled at the national level could yield very interesting and useful information about a variety of topics, including the status of overall airport pavement conditions in the United States and the typical performance of different surface types in different climatic regions. To address this lack of information at the national level, the paper collected airport pavement management data from 22 states, representing 1,360 airports, 20,000 pavement sections, and approximately 2 billon square feet of pavement. Most of the 22 states do not tract the airport classification, such as general aviation, reliever, commercial, and so on. Therefore, it is not possible to break out the results by airport type. However, it is likely that at least 75 percent of the airports are general aviation, with most of the rest being reliever airports. The data represents six states in the Western and Northern Atlantic regions, seven states in the Central region, and three states in the Southern region. All the data were stored in a Micro PAVER database, which facilitated the analysis of the data. The collected data were analyzed to identify national and regional trends. Specifically, conditions at the national and regional level, broken out by pavement use and surface type, were evaluated. Further, pavement performance models were developed to identify typical performance trends of different pavement types, pavement uses and in different climatic regions. This paper presents the results of this analysis.