North Bay airport gets $5M upgrade: Crosswind runway updated to meet modern standards.

AuthorKelly, Lindsay

The secondary runway at Jack Garland Airport in North Bay has received a $5-million upgrade.

At 5,000 feet, the crosswind runway is half the size of the facility's 10,000-foot main runway, but it had deteriorated to a point that renovations could no longer be deferred.

"It has not received anything other than repair and overhaul for 30 years," said Kelly Hewitt, the airport's commercial development manager. "So it was at the point where something needed to be done or we were going to have to look at limiting its operation."

Pilots use a crosswind runway when winds are high and using the main runway would jeopardize a safe landing. Smaller aircraft are particularly impacted by crosswinds.

In North Bay, renovations consisted of removing all the asphalt from the crosswind runway and performing some maintenance work on the substrate, Hewitt said.

Since many of the industry regulations have changed over the last three decades, the runway had to be brought up to contemporary standards, he noted.

That included lighting and the landscaping of the runway end safety areas (RESAS), areas surrounding the runway serving as a sort of safety net that helps reduce potential damage to a plane that overshoots the runway.

"These areas had to be graded, and they had to have a proper type of gravel, so that if you did, under unfortunate circumstances, go off the end of the runway, the type of runout that was there now had to be engineered, whereas before it was just a field," Hewitt said.

Though initial estimates put the work at just over $3 million, Hewitt said the airport opted to pay a little more to upgrade the electrical system for the runway lights, installing new wiring and, in some cases, switching over to more efficient LED lights.

It made sense to do the work while the runway was already being dug up, he noted, rather than revisit the project at a future date.

"It was a larger project, but we still cost-contained and put it together so that we weren't actually doing repairs to our repair in just a few years down the road," he said.

Work began in June and wrapped up on Aug. 23, about a month past the original July deadline.

Inclement weather and scheduling conflicts with electricians and painters prolonged the project, Hewitt said. But no flights had to be turned away, and now both runways are back to running smoothly.

The final price tag worked out to about $1 million per 1,000 feet of runway, a portion--$2.4 million --was covered by the Northern...

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