Officials at the Chennai airport are praying that no untoward incident should happen in the next nine months till the resurfacing of the 3.65-km main runway is completed.

“Fingers crossed,” said an airport official on the long haul ahead; re-carpeting work started on August 21.

His worry is understandable. Ten days back, an aircraft was slightly damaged due to the presence of debris on the runway from the resurfacing work. The runway had to be shut for nearly two hours and ten flights were diverted to Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Frequent flyers are perplexed as to why it should take nine months for a project that is like re-laying a highway.

It is not quite a simple project, the official replied. A functioning airport with a single runway has many challenges. Every day, the runway is closed for nearly seven-and-half hours and a meticulous planning is done with various stakeholders, especially airlines, to ensure that there is no trouble during this time.

Depending on the available length of runway and the restricted facilities during the work period, airlines change the type of aircraft they use, limit the take-off load or change their schedule to co-ordinate with the work period, says Chennai Airport Director Deepak Shastri.

Other airports too faced similar challenges when doing runway resurfacing work.

For instance, from May 1, the Kozhikode international airport has been partially shut for runway repair, which will take 15 months to complete. Wide-bodied aircraft such as Airbus 300, Boeing 747 and 777 will not be allowed for eight months and for seven months after that, they will be allowed only for certain hours every day.

The Bengaluru airport was closed for nearly seven hours to all flight operations from March 11 to April 3 for resurfacing of its sole runway. In the next two phases, the runway was partly closed during till May 1, he said.

A runway at the Newark airport in the US was closed for five months early this year for resurfacing.

In major airports abroad the resurfacing is done in two-three months as they have parallel runways and closure of one does not affect operations.

Why resurfacing?

As planes take off and land, the rubber deposits left behind by the tyres build up. Also, oil condensation from the engine’s exhaust gets deposited on the runway during take off. All this makes the runway slippery, requiring periodical resurfacing, says B Govindarajan, Chief Operating Officer, Tirwin Management Services, a Chennai-based aviation training consultancy firm.

Mohan Ranganathan, an aviation safety consultant and a former instructor pilot of Boeing 737 specialising in wet runway operations training, said that during the resurfacing, the available distance of the runway will be short.

Pilots should be well aware of this fact and land the aircraft accordingly.

In 2009, while the recarpeting work was going on at the Mumbai airport, an aircraft overran the runway.

“It could be dangerous if the aircraft is not flown accurately in the short runway,” he said.

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