Runway lights on Salzburg Airport

Possehl Spezialbau has completed surface illumination works on Salzburg Airport’s new runway.

The company, which specialises in the maintenance of vehicular and aircraft-use surfaces, used Tyrolit CDL core drill bits to make more than 800 holes in the runway, for the installation of state-of-the-art LED-illumination.

Possehl used a beheading machine to divide the runway, which measured 45 m (147 ft) wide and 2.8 km (1.7 miles) long, into smaller concrete panels to create as a tension-free base layer. The company used three different specifications of Tyrolit floor saw blades to finish the task, which required over 10.8 km (6.7 miles) of preparatory floor cuts with a width of 15 mm and a depth of 300 mm (three-fifths on an inch to 12 in). This amounted to 240 cuts of 45 m each in length. 

The company worked with fellow specialist construction firms, ÖBA and OAT, in order to complete the job within a five-day time slot.

Salzburg Airport’s runway 15/33 was closed for five weeks while around 8,500 t of the original 60 year old runway surface was crushed and recycled. The resulting aggregate was used for the sub-structure of the new runway surface, which comprised 120,000 t of asphalt.