Airport Pavement Roughness with Nighttime Construction

Surface elevation profiles were measured before and after overlay operations on runways at two commercial airports in the USA. Each airport had only one runway. All overlaying was done at night, with the airports opened for normal operations during the day. The profiles were measured with an inertial profiler having software compensation for accelerometer errors. Pavement surface elevations measured with normal surveying rod and level equipment are compared with the profiler elevation measurements for one of the runways. With the exception of some very long wavelength distortion in the profiler measurements, correspondence between the two different methods is good. The profiles were processed to provide measures of roughness from simulations of a straightedge, a California Profilograph, and the Boeing Bump Criteria. The roughness of the overlaid pavements is quantified and compared. Measurements of the vertical response of an instrumented B-727 aircraft on one of the runways are also presented. Transverse construction joints are shown to be significant contributors to the roughness of the pavements.
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